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THE MODERN NOVEL 



BY WILSON FOLLETT 




BY HELEN THOMAS FOLLETT 
and WILSON FOLLETT 

SOME MODERN NOVELISTS 



THE 
MODERN NOVEL 

A STUDY OF THE PURPOSE 
AND THE MEANING OF FICTION 



BY 

WILSON FOLLETT 




NEW YORK ALFRED A, KNOPF MCMXVIII 



COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 



^**« 






OCT -! ! 9!8 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OT AMERICA 

©CI.A503664 



PREFACE 

This book is an attempt to trace the development of 
some important principles of fictional criticism dur- 
ing the two centuries of the novel in English, and 
to show how the development of these principles has 
in turn altered the shape of the modern novel. From 
the point of view here maintained, criticism is not 
only effect but also cause. Its ideas are indeed 
gradually evolved from what has been done, and of 
course from what has been poorly done or left undone ; 
but they are with equal certainty gradually incor- 
porated into what is being done, and this second 
half of the process is none the less significant for 
having been so largely neglected by the conventional 
critic and historian. Criticism is a forecast as well 
as a record, and a leverage for raising the standard 
as well as a standard held up. This endless cycle 
of interactions is what I have studied, in an effort to 
show how criticism itself is creative, and especially 
how both the critical and the creative forces of past 
generations come to focus in the latest definable stage 
of fiction, that of the late 19th century and the 
early 20th. I have tried to accomplish that pur- 
pose with a due recognition that this, or any, latest 
stage is itself but tentative and experimental. The 
novel as we have it is the past crystallizing; but, 

5 



PREFACE 



thanks to the force of criticism and to no other force 
whatsoever, it is as truly the future germinating. 

If the function here ascribed to criticism seem over- 
stated, one has only to reflect how trifling a part of the 
whole body of criticism is comprised by its special and 
formal embodiments in reviews, essays, histories, ap- 
preciations and estimates of individual authors or 
periods, and books about books — including such books 
as this. A novelist more or less consciously picks and 
chooses among the past achievements of the art he 
practises, reassembling them as the basis for his own 
superstructure. His doing so is criticism. Subse- 
quently, he is always examining the materials and 
proportions of his own structure, to strengthen or 
modify or discard ; and the process by which he does 
that is criticism. He learns much from his successes 
and failures ; something from his readers ; more from 
the successes and failures of his contemporaries; a 
little perhaps from the formal appraisals of the critic 
— in short, he grows, or at least changes, and his 
growth is a result of criticism. Whole generations 
and schools of novelists, in periods of international 
diffusion such as the latter 17th century and the 
early 20th, learn from the fiction and the criticism 
of other countries; on a sudden, perhaps indeed 
too suddenly, their ingrowing provincialism becomes 
outward-reaching cosmopolitanism. That change 
means criticism brought to bear on a still grander 
scale. And, finally, whatever other forces fail or 
prevail, there is always the Zeitgeist, the general 
movement and direction of humane consciousness 



PREFACE 



— a subtle, irresistible, ceaseless play of criticism over 
the whole field of things dreamed, known, or done, 
compelling all representative art, in common with all 
other civilized manifestations, to be a response to 
needs so inchoate that they may never have got them- 
selves expressed or acknowledged save in their re- 
sults, yet so universally cogent that no living indi- 
vidual can will to refuse them his service. 

Everything, properly considered, is a criticism of 
everything else. "Whenever we perceive the differ- 
ences between one thing and another, and then com- 
mit ourselves to a choice in the light of some felt need 
for one thing as against the other, we perform an act 
of criticism. It is manifestly a danger that we shall 
underrate, rather than overrate, the momentousness 
of the critical faculty so defined. 

This book is not, then, primarily a history of the 
English novel from Defoe to Hardy, even though it 
includes much illustrative description of the princi- 
pal developments between 1700 and 1900 ; and neither 
is it a treatise on criticism or the aesthetics of fiction 
in vacuo. It is a statement of some critical and 
aesthetic principles in terms of their historical evolu- 
tion in and from the English novel. I choose the 
English novel because on the whole it developed most 
provincially, refusing until singularly late to become 
a matter of comparative literature, and becoming at 
length so suddenly overwhelmed with international 
modernness that its story seems especially determinate 
and dramatic. It should be added that I have not 
been ashamed to include a great deal of historical in- 



8 PREFACE 



formation simply because I think it ought to be fa- 
miliar to students of the novel, or to make use of the 
obvious and the truistic when to do so helps the argu- 
ment. 

It is a graceless thing to parade one's own merits, 
but I really cannot forbear pointing out my one small 
claim to the gratitude of all and sundry. Except for 
a trivial indiscretion committed by Mr. William Dean 
PTowells more than a quarter of a century ago, and 
reproduced on page 268, you might search in vain 
through these ten chapters for the aimless and ques- 
tion-begging word "psychology" or any of its deri- 
vatives. 

W. F. 



CONTENTS 

I The Creative Impulse 11 

II Romance 43 

III Sentimentalism 71 

IV Didacticism 101 
V Satire 131 

VI The Realistic Spirit 155 
VII Tragedy and Comedy 181 
VIII Humanism 207 
IX Design 235 
X "Entertainment" 263 
Bibliography 287 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 



This series of discussions about the purpose and 
the meaning of fiction does not aspire to be anything 
half so fundamental or half so presumptuous as a 
metaphysical justification of the novel. The meta- 
physical justification of anything — including both fic- 
tion, which is a "criticism of life," and life itself — 
rests on premises dictated by the philosophy one hap- 
pens to believe in. To the pessimist, nothing justifies 
its existence, not even his own despair; to the opti- 
mist, all things work together for good, even the 
things that seem, when taken by themselves and mo- 
mentarily, worst. The cynic sage who wrote, in a 
burst of fretful impatience, "Of making books there 
is no end," would have found nothing to solace him 
in this age when, it is said, everybody who is not writ- 
ing novels is reading them, and when (it may be 
added) every one is talking about them, even the per- 
sons who neither read nor write them. The optimist, 
on the other hand, is not only not put out of coun- 
tenance by the making and selling of many very bad 
books, but he can even face without chagrin the sad 
modern industry of reviewing them. 

Now it is not the function of the critic to dictate 
to his audience the philosophical opinions they should 
hold; they would not listen to him anyway, for we 

13 



14 THE MODERN NOVEL 

choose our philosophies, as we do our occupations or 
our neckties, by temperamental bias. Theologies go 
as much by favour as kisses do. Any discussion has 
to begin therefore with immense assumptions, — that 
is, if it insist on getting somewhere, — and even what 
we call "first principles" take unspeakable things for 
granted. What we must take for granted here is a 
certain resigned and unflinching state of the con- 
science, an objective and impartially inquiring condi- 
tion to which most humane intelligences come sooner 
or later, in which all the works of both nature and 
man seem worth an expenditure of interest or of 
curiosity — among them not least the fine art of telling 
stories. 

It is far from my thought to say that whatever is is 
right, — the philosophy of a shallow opportunist with- 
out responsibility, — or that a thing is good simply 
because it exists in great quantity, as anything must 
to be popularly accredited. But one can say that 
there is a very important sense in which whatever ex- 
ists is worth considering, even if the consideration 
amount only to a casual passing glance. The uni- 
versality of our interest in fiction does not prove that 
fiction has any inherent right to the space it occupies 
in our libraries or in our lives ; but it does prove that 
we have given fiction a sort of pragmatic claim on us 
by giving so much of ourselves to it. In short, books, 
and more especially novels, are worth writing and 
buying and reading and criticizing in just about the 
measure of our finding them so. Work of the hand, 
work of the brain — it is all subject to the same law; 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 15 

this law which, where it touches the study of the 
classics, also a pursuit resting on vast assumptions, we 
tritely embody in an admonition to young men who 
are supposed not to enjoy their work: "You'll get 
out of it exactly what you put into it." Things 
mean what we find in them or bring out of them for 
ourselves, by imagination, insight, the will to be in- 
terested; books are worth whatever we make them 
worth in terms of our own curiosity or wonder or 
inspiration — the impersonal virtues of the mind. 

Such then is the initial postulate, and the only jus- 
tification of the novel that need be attempted here. 
The study of fiction is a pleasurable task whose value 
is to be measured, not in abstractions, not in any re- 
mote philosophical or aBSthetic categories, but em- 
pirically and pragmatically, in terms of its effect on 
our own emotions and wills. The question is not, 
What must be our attitude toward the art of fiction? 
It is rather, What must fiction have done to us be- 
fore it becomes deserving of consideration as an art? 
Fiction is a creative art in that it creates something 
in its audience. Therein it is like friendship. He 
who makes a friend, as Mr. Chesterton says, makes 
a man. The novelist and his reader create and per- 
petuate each other, by a uniquely impersonal reci- 
procity. The ideal responsibility of fiction is to 
make us dream nobly and disinterestedly, to give a 
beautiful and intelligible shape to the best of our 
desire. If it do that, it justifies itself in and through 
us. Meanwhile it is for criticism to say whether the 
dreaming is noble and disinterested, the shape of it a 



16 THE MODERN NOVEL 

beautiful and intelligible one; to make sure that our 
bread is not a stone — or, as Professor Saintsbury says 
in a slightly different connection, pie-crust. 

And so we begin a stage farther along than the 
question whether the intrinsic claim of the novel is 
such that we ought to concede anything to it ; farther 
along, where we meet these two other questions, What 
are the claims of the novel? and What is or may be 
the nature of the concession we do make? 



II 



There is, it will appear from the form of these 
questions, a reason for the apparent repetition in a 
general title such as "The Purpose and the Meaning 
of Fiction. ' ' The purpose of fiction is one thing : the 
meaning of fiction is, or may be, quite another. We 
can see and admit forthwith, as an axiom of good 
sense, that high merit in fiction is likely to have some- 
thing to do with the incidence of purpose and mean- 
ing; the best novel, other things being equal, is that 
in which the effect sensed by the reader is most like 
that intended by the author, and the poorest novel, 
other things remaining equal, is that in which the ef- 
fect sensed is least like that intended. One does, to 
be sure, hear music discussed by seemingly intelligent 
persons who profess to believe that the composer 
merely surrenders himself to inexplicable impulses and 
emotions, creating he knows not what, and caring not 
at all whether his impulses and emotions are repro- 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 17 

duced in the listener, so long as some sufficiently in- 
tense effects are produced. To any one who traces in 
music primarily its design or pattern — or, let us say, 
to whom music is unintelligible without its pattern — 
this is an abhorrent theory of inspiration. Still, 
many persons do hold it; and perhaps it may be ex- 
tended without flagrant irrationality to lyric poetry, 
and even to some kinds of plastic representation. But 
hardly to imaginative literature as we have known it 
in prose. We dispute now and again about what 
Shakspere meant by certain parts of Hamlet; but 
no one doubts that he meant something, that he was 
deliberately trying to communicate the same meaning 
to us all, and that either the play or the audience 
relatively fails whenever the audience misses com- 
munity of impression. In this discussion of the re- 
lation between purveyor and public, it makes little 
difference which fails : the point is all in the success or 
failure of the relation. There is no consummation of 
art except in the audience. 

It is quite true that, in some rare instances, the 
artist may profit by an effect not in his intention; 
may actually, without knowing it, build better than 
his design. Every reader of Fielding will remember 
two gentlemen, or rather two animated and diverting 
caricatures, by name Thwackum and Square, who had 
charge of the upbringing of Tom Jones. Mr. Square 
the philosopher is always talking about "the natural 
beauty of virtue"; to Mr. Thwackum the clergyman 
there is no power except "the divine power of grace." 
Probably Fielding intended to represent, in these two 



18 THE MODERN NOVEL 

quaint ethical theorists, simply two characteristic 
18th century notions which he hated and wished 
to hold up to ridicule: the notion that thinking 
straight is the way of salvation however crooked one 's 
conduct, and the notion that straight conduct is 
worthless unless it is inspired by a prescribed way 
of thinking — in this instance the creed of the Church 
of England. Both figures are incomplete as men; 
they remain simply walking embodiments of their 
respective narrow doctrines, in spite of Fielding's evi- 
dent desire to give them human nature and make 
them humanly live. It takes a more modern detach- 
ment than Fielding ever knew to see the fitness of 
his failure. There is an almost symbolic appropriate- 
ness in the hollow unreality of Messrs. Thwackum and 
Square : how could such ideas, so held, produce actual 
human beings? The limitations of these two as men 
prove, as no amount of calculated satire could, the 
limitations of their doctrines. It takes the capacity 
for spontaneous warm-hearted action, plus the sense 
of legitimate impersonal law imposed from without, to 
make the rounded man ; to be complete and real is to 
adjust the natural inward impulses to the artificial 
codes by which we must needs partly live. How fit- 
ting, then, that it should take Thwackum and Square 
together to come somewhere near making up one aver- 
age piece of human nature ! Here is an instance which 
shows the artist gaining something through his failure 
to carry out his intention : if the characters were com- 
plete as men, they would be pointless and inconsistent 
as doctrinaires. And I have sometimes thought that 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 19 

so great an artist as Jane Austen gains as a social 
comedist by revealing in the world of her persons a 
moral poverty and narrowness which she hardly saw 
there herself. 

Such examples are, however, not frequent. In gen- 
eral the novelist loses by missing his design. Jane 
Eyre is weakened, however far from crucially, be- 
cause Rochester, who was intended for a gentleman, is 
so obviously a cad. The history of fiction is full of 
writers who lost much through the illusion that they 
could portray types they did not know and manage 
scenes they had never caught the spirit of. 

We want fiction, then, to understand what it is 
about and plan the effect which it can produce. But 
this is not to say that the plan and the effect are the 
same thing. The given effect may follow from the 
given cause, but cause is still one thing and effect an- 
other. In considering fiction, it happens to be of 
singular importance to keep this disjunction in mind, 
to the end that we may understand something of the 
all-important relation between subjective and objec- 
tive. That is why I have made the first group of 
these discussions deal with fiction as I suppose it to be 
conceived and written, the second group with fiction as 
it is read and understood. I want to analyse first, as 
well as I can, what writers put into their stories and 
the processes by which they put it in ; and then, what 
readers get out of those stories and the re-creative 
processes by which they get it out. 

And naturally I begin with the mainspring of all 
poetic effort, the initial creative impulse, asking some 



20 THE MODERN NOVEL 

very plain and elemental questions: What is the 
force which urges the story-teller to take up the pen 
and drive it forward? Whence comes that special 
desire of his to tell a story for the delight or the profit 
of those whom he has never seen, and what is the 
nature of that desire? It will be understood that 
there is here no speaking officially or pro domo, no 
claim of special divination: we proceed by deduction 
and inference, trying if we can to descry the intention 
in the performance, as Mr. Kipling's Builder, com- 
ing on the ruined work of a predecessor, reads 

"The form of the dream he had followed in the face of the 
thing he had planned." 



Ill 



I have spoken of fiction as having something to do 
with dreaming: let me distinguish it at once from 
that idle and irresponsible day-dreaming in which, at 
odd times, we all lose ourselves with a certain vision- 
ary of modern fiction, "forgetting the bitterness of toil 
and strife in the vision of a great and splendid re- 
ward." 1 We all lie awake at night and plan for 
ourselves impossible golden futures in which we are 
the impossible heroes and heroines, achieving the 
prodigious with hardly the effort which in real life 
we must give to the commonplace, getting our ene- 

i Almayer, in Almayer's Folly. By Joseph Conrad. New 
York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 21 



mies humbled and our supreme deserts acknowledged 
and rewarded, and having our own way generally. 
There is a superstition abroad that the genetic im- 
pulse of fiction is like this, and fiction itself the 
writer's dream, his escape from burdensome actuali- 
ties. And certainly many readers take their fiction 
as an escape, a drug or anodyne — a kind of vicarious 
day-dreaming. 

Not so, I believe, the artist. The only day-dreams 
really worth while are those in which we lose our- 
selves, transcending reality as on wings, breathing 
upper airs of impossible rarity; but the only novels 
really worth while are those in which the novelist 
never for an instant loses his complete sense of self- 
possession, the perfect awareness of what he is about. 
His dreaming is purposed and controlled ; it differs in 
a dozen sharp and unequivocal ways from the purely 
subjective dreams through which the best of us at 
times let ourselves beautifully drift. Our dreams are 
exceptional and lawless, we conjure up delights that 
never were on land or sea; the novelist's dream is 
typical and regulated. Our dreams are very likely to 
be patched copies of other dreams heard or read, as 
every cheap popular song is a mosaic of all other 
cheap popular songs; whereas the novelist's dream 
must be, in its central nature, an original thing, or it 
would better not be at all. What we distort, he re- 
duces to shape and balance ; what we leave to its own 
unobstructed play on our charitable credulity, he 
cannot leave until it is presentable to the uncharitable 
incredulity of mankind in general. Our day-dream is 



22 THE MODERN NOVEL 

a result of inhibitions broken down and swept away : 
we let ourselves go. The novelist, however like his 
creative instinct may be to ours, cannot do that; half 
the worth of his dream is in the checks and inhibi- 
tions which govern the unfolding of it. 

All these differences reduce themselves on inspec- 
tion to a single inclusive difference: we dream day- 
dreams for pure self -delight, using the gift of fancy 
to glut ourselves; whereas the novelist writes stories 
in order to give himself, for the delight of readers 
whom he has never seen and cannot know. The con- 
ditions of his work are determined by the fact that 
it is work and not play; by the fact that he has an 
audience with a receptivity subservient to a set of 
laws which he must master ; a set of exceedingly subtle 
and elusive laws whose working is of a nicety almost 
past finding out. The one faculty upon which he 
cannot play at will is that self-love which is in every 
one of us, and which is alone sufficient to give our 
day-dreams the temporary illusion of reality. We 
can believe in anything so long as it is ours, part of 
us. But the novelist asks us to enter into something 
which is not ours at all, something to which our self- 
interest can give no hue of reality, since no self-inter- 
est is at hazard. The artist is always trying to ap- 
peal to an attention outside and other than his own. 
Without this will to appeal there is no art. 

It is some such set of considerations which we forget 
when we define art as " self -expression " — an unintel- 
ligible definition, confusing as it does this ordered and 
self-possessed visioning of the artist with the un- 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 23 

bridled self-gratification of our most selfish moments. 
Of course we express ourselves in whatever we do ; all 
activity is self-expression, so that the term really de- 
fines nothing because it covers everything. Walking 
is self-expression, if you like, and the gait an index 
of character. So is lying: it is possible that we are 
never more truly ourselves than when we think we 
are concealing ourselves. But we walk to get some- 
where; we lie to accomplish something. A novel too 
is a measure of its writer ; but he writes it in order to 
get something communicated. He cannot help ex- 
pressing himself : a man under an anaesthetic, or inco- 
herently drunk, or suffocating in thick smoke where 
he must shout for help, does that. But the whole 
crux of the novelist's difficulty is to get himself 
communicated; and it is a sentimental mistake of 
some popular theorists to suppose that he can do that 
by pure "inspiration," or pure self-communion apart 
from his audience in the penetralia of his own con- 
sciousness. The lyric poet may sometimes, not other- 
wise than by happiest accident, speak to us intelligibly 
from those hidden recesses. Not so the novelist. He 
deals with a truth which cannot be breathed out of 
himself : he must seek it through the world with pain 
and effort, win it for his own by living it — 

"For truth needs doing; beauty seems 
A dream till we awake from dreams" — 

and shape and re-clothe it, not for himself, but for us. 

He will do well to remember, if the struggle for bare 

existence has not already made it impossible to forget, 



24 THE MODERN NOVEL 



Stevenson's comparison of the artist to the file de 
joie, the obscure and draggled woman of the streets; 
for he too is taking pay for his laughter, his com- 
panionship, the gift of himself, nor can anything hide 
or change the elemental fact which is the material 
excuse for his trade — the fact that he lives by it. 
''An author," says Fielding at the beginning of Tom 
Jones, "ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman 
who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather 
as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all per- 
sons are welcome for their money. . . . Men who pay 
for what they eat will insist on gratifying their pal- 
ates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; 
and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will 
challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to damn 
their dinner without control." The best instincts 
in us may lament the fact: Mr. Howells says, in 
writing of "The Man of Letters as a Man of Busi- 
ness, " 1 "I do not think any man ought to live by 
an art. . . . There is an instinctive sense of this, even 
in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our eco- 
nomic being; people feel that there is something pro- 
fane, something impious, in taking money for a pic- 
ture, or a poem, or a statue. . . . The instinctive 
sense of the dishonour which money-purchase does to 
art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who 
can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, 
as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, 
and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble 

i In Literature and Life. By William Dean Howells. New 
York: Harper & Bros. 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 25 

But even such personal independence 
only shifts the evil: "Byron's publisher profited by 
a generosity which did not reach his readers ; and the 
Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright which her 
husband foregoes [this was published in 1902] ; so 
that these two eminent instances of protest against 
business in literature may be said not to have shaken 
its money basis. ' ' And even if writer, publisher, and 
public could all completely escape buying and selling, 
the writer would still have no hold upon his public ex- 
cept by pleasing it. His appeal as an artist is de- 
pendent on the arbitrary taste of a multitude, even if 
his living cease to be — so that if he can make up his 
mind to the greater limitation, it is hardly worth his 
while to boggle at the lesser. 

We need no Fielding, no Stevenson, no Howells 
come to tell us such things : they are matters of plain- 
est hardest common sense. But they are too often 
forgotten. The argument has sometimes been used to 
justify giving the buying and reading public the poor- 
est thing it can be brought to accept, instead of the 
best thing it, perhaps unconsciously, wants; but al- 
most any argument can be prostituted to a low ex- 
pediency. We say that the artist must serve, if he 
is to discharge his office at all : this is not to say that he 
ought to pander. If he choose to pander, we should 
let him ; our safeguard against him is the public right 
to find him out in the long run and have no more of 
him; it is not in the destruction of his right to be 
what he chooses. But in either event, whether he 
panders or truly serves, he has fully as much to gain 



26 THE MODERN NOVEL 

through self-suppression as through self-expression. 
He must be true to himself ; but that fidelity will avail 
him nothing unless he is also true to his audience, to 
his subject, and to the obscure principles of his appeal 
to thousands of intelligences as unlike his own as they 
are unlike each other. 

Let us see, if we can, what some of the chief of 
these principles are, and how they operate; what 
kinds of provision the novelist must make for his 
audience that the mere dreamer of dreams takes no 
thought of. 

IV 

One thinks pretty readily of four special ways in 
which the novelist must take thought and thoroughly 
know what he is about ; four provisions which he must 
thoroughly accomplish if his work is completely to 
justify itself in our eyes. They are, to name them 
only: (1) Realism of Circumstance; (2) Truth by 
Representation; (3) Freshness or Originality; and 
(4) Fusion of these three and of all the other ele- 
ments that enter into his subject. Realism, Repre- 
sentation, Originality, and Fusion. Let us see what 
ought to be meant by these labels. 

The first, Realism of Circumstance, explains itself. 
Of the realistic spirit I shall have, later on, much 
more to say: I speak here, not of a spirit, but of a 
process. It is obvious enough that the sound master 
of fiction, knowing that he can successfully impart no 
dream of his through credulity based on self-love, 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 27 

must take infinite precaution that it shall seem true; 
and that the more romantic it is in essence the more 
realistic he must make it in detail. There is no bet- 
ter exemplification of this truism than that Daniel 
Defoe — a master, Professor Sir Walter Raleigh calls 
him, of "grave imperturbable lying" — who wrote a 
lengthy account of the London plague of 1665 with 
such vividness that many unlearned readers still ac- 
cept it as the account of an eye-witness, though Defoe 
was but four years old in the Plague Year; who con- 
trived a recital of a certain great November storm 
from hearsay and imagination, recounting casualties 
by land and sea, and including wholly fictitious letters 
from eye-witnesses who never existed ; who gave many 
preposterous events in all parts of the world the 
immediacy and the ring of truth, simply by giving 
them a latitude and a longitude ; and who, as the sum- 
mit of his achievement, took the most utterly romantic 
figure of all, the lonely hermit of Juan Fernandez, 
and made him easily the most real of all, by diary, by 
dialogue, by inventory, by all the little fine arts of 
persuasion. "There never was such a man or such 
an island," you say (it makes no difference that, 
historically speaking, there was) ; "there never was 
a Crusoe, or a hut with a hedge of stakes round it, 
or a boat hollowed labouriously out of a tree and then 
found to be immovably heavy." To which credulity 
answers: "Ah, but you forget: all these things were, 
because a man wrote a diary about them! They 
might, in an ordinary sea-tale, seem rather a large 
order; but — why, we have the man's own diary!" 



28 THE MODERN NOVEL 

And there is an image of what the artist's quest 
for actuality must be, in a certain "scowered" silk 
dress worn by a lady some twenty-four hours dead, 
and used by Defoe to help sell a seventh-rate and un- 
salable clerical work, Drelincourt's Book of Consola- 
tions Against the Fears of Death, with which the Lon- 
don book trade appears to have been overstocked in 
1705. The estimable Mrs. Bargrave, living at Can- 
terbury, receives one morning a call from her old 
friend and neighbour Mrs. Veal, whom she has not 
seen for a long time, and who announces now that she 
has come to say good-bye before taking a journey. 
The two gossip together in a most natural and familiar 
vein, about head-aches, and husbands, and friend- 
ship, and the degeneracy of the times, and other re- 
liable subjects, taking pains to allude several times 
to the great comfort and inspiration they have re- 
ceived from that incomparable work, the Book of 
Consolations. All is most natural; the talk proceeds 
like a stenographic report of things actually said by 
two such middle-class, prosy, and sentimental per- 
sons. " 'Do not you think I am mightily impaired 
by my fits?' " asks Mrs. Veal. " 'No,' says Mrs. 
Bargrave, 'I think you look as well as ever I knew 
you.' " And again: "Says Mrs. Bargrave: 'It is 
hard indeed to find a true friend in these days.' 
Says Mrs. Veal, 'Mr. Norris has a fine copy of verses, 
called Friendship in Perfection, which I wonderfully 
admire. Have you seen the book?' 'No,' says Mrs. 
Bargrave, 'but I have the verses of my own writing 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 29 

out.' 'Have you?' says Mrs. Veal, 'then fetch them.' 
Which she did from above-stairs, and offered them to 
Mrs. Veal to read, who refused, and waived the thing, 
saying, holding down her head would make it ache; 
and then desiring Mrs. Bargrave to read them to her, 
which she did. ... In these verses there is twice 
used the word 'Elysian.' 'Ah!' says Mrs. Veal, 
'these poets have such names for heaven.' " In 
short, the whole tale is inimitably and incontestably 
true, up to the point where it transpires that at the 
time of this conversation Mrs. Veal was also incon- 
testably dead. Everything in the story is true except 
the whole of it. And mark how difficult Defoe makes 
it to question even that whole. The tale is told by 
a third woman of exactly the same stamp as the other 
two, a life-long friend of Mrs. Bargrave, ready to 
heap scorn on the husband and neighbours of Mrs. 
Veal, who deny the story and impeach the character 
of Mrs. Bargrave. Why, Mrs. Bargrave is "of a 
cheerful disposition, notwithstanding the ill-usage of 
a very wicked husband"; of course, then, the story 
is true. Besides, this third woman's story has been 
taken down by a lawyer, who believes it himself; 
clearly, then, it must be true! Moreover, Mrs. Bar- 
grave had described in considerable detail the 
"scowered" silk dress which Mrs. Veal actually 
wore on the day of her death, the day of the alleged 
visit, though Mrs. Bargrave had never seen that dress 
or known of its existence: what do you say to that? 
O well, if Mrs. Bargrave really described the dress, 



30 THE MODERN NOVEL 

there's nothing more to be said; the story is true, 
and the Book of Consolations is a fine book, and let's 
all go and see if there is a copy to be had. 

Observe, incidentally, the advertising logic of the 
appeal: Drelincourt must be a book to buy, because 
a ghost said so. We shall not be far amiss if we 
think of Defoe as having been, among other things 
variously important, the father of modern advertis- 
ing. What it is most desirable to point out here is 
that he mastered to perfection the art of making a 
little extraneous and unimportant fact go as far as 
possible toward establishing his central fiction. The 
more outrageous his fundamental demand on the 
credulity, the more care must he take to weave that 
demand out of a tissue of the commonplace, the daily 
homespun actual. And so it is ever with the worker 
in fiction. He must do for a high impersonal end 
what Defoe did, on more than one occasion, to serve 
a rather low commercial or political expediency. 



This first kind of care, for Realism of Circumstance, 
makes a target of the credulity ; its purpose is to make 
one see and, through seeing, believe. Fiction has 
been much likened, of late, to journalism ; but in this 
respect at least it differs from journalism. We have 
a presumption in favour of the truth of what the 
newspaper reporter tells us; at least we do unless 
we make a serious matter of the trite popular joke 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 31 

about reporters. But our presumption is all against 
the truth of what the novelist tells us. Of the two, 
it is he who nlust take pains to make his story seem 
true; and when he makes it seem truer than truth, 
we believe him. 

But his truth to fact, though one of the conditions 
of his usefulness, is far from being his prime value. 
Fiction begins to accomplish its real purpose when it 
attains what I have called Truth by Representation. 
It must first make us believe ; it must then evoke from 
us a response to that which we have accepted as truth. 
And it does this through implied reference to larger 
realities than are explicitly presented; such realities 
as the common truths of all life, the mysteries of 
birth and death, the invincible ambitions and terrors 
of the mind, the moral law, the general nature of 
things. Fiction must have its facts ; but it must also 
have its "meaning of things beyond the facts." For 
it is in the linking of subordinate trivial details and 
episodes with the trend of a whole individual life, 
and in the linking of the individual life with the whole 
collective mass of human lives, that the novel wins 
its place as a " criticism of life. ' ' 

I can think of no better example of a story that 
has this kind of reference in large and satisfying 
measure than one very familiar story notably lack- 
ing in our lesser and lower kind of realism: Dr. 
Johnson's wholly pleasing and still strangely beauti- 
ful story of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. I am 
aware that a good many critics have described Ras- 
selas as a romantic expression of pessimism, and also 



32 THE MODERN NOVEL 

that Professor William Lyon Phelps has lately taken 
the trouble to pronounce a curt little requiescat 1 
over what he considers a corpse past resuscitating. 
But how can Rasselas be, or become, a dead story 
when it contains so much wisdom about life, garbed 
in so beautiful a vesture of imagery and symbolism? 
And how can it be called a pessimistic story, when it 
contains, not a philosophical interpretation of a fact, 
but the bare and simple fact alone ? ' ' The Vanity of 
Human Wishes" — that is the theme of Rasselas, the 
large general fact about life which it represents. 
Well, human wishes are vain, aren't they? which is 
all that Dr. Johnson says. He bases his tale on the 
fact, hardly open to dispute, that whatever we get 
out of life we do not get what we are looking for. 
He does not say that we ought to get what we are 
looking for; he does not say, as a pessimist would, 
that our failure to get it proves the evil organization 
of the world. Johnson draws his indictment, not 
against the sorry scheme of things which cheats hu- 
man nature out of its fond hopes, but against the 
sorry scheme of human nature itself, which hopes 
unreasonably, vaunts itself, overestimates its own de- 
serts, and claims more than it is in the nature of 
things to grant. Rasselas is a plea for classical or 
stoic discipline of the will. At the best, it says, 

"Man has but little here below, 
Nor has that little long": 

then it is the part of wisdom for him to curb his ex- 

i In The Advance of the English 'Novel. By William Lyon 
Phelps. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 






THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 33 

pectations, make the most of his little, and turn from 
following illusive phantoms of happiness and free- 
dom which the collective wisdom of mankind has 
never been able to capture. Rasselas and his sister 
leave their Happy Valley to fare through the world 
in search of contentment. They find many strange 
things, and some sad ones; they find wisdom and 
folly, work and idleness, pleasure of the voluptuary 
and asceticism of the hermit, all strivings and all 
miseries — but not contentment. In the end they go 
back to the Happy Valley, dedicating themselves to 
the idea of service to their own people, a beneficent 
rule. Johnson never says that idleness is better than 
work, that folly is as good as wisdom: he says only 
that life is for every one of us something other than 
we expect it to be, and that we have not learned the 
secret of what life is until we stop abusing it for not 
living up to our misconception of it. This is not 
pessimistic doctrine : it is wise counsel, based on one of 
the eternal verities, deriving its sweetness from a 
pervasive mild melancholy far removed from cyni- 
cism, and its strength from the universal applicabil- 
ity of its one central truth about life. 

This kind of appeal through a large general truth, of 
which Rasselas is one of the purest examples, makes 
the least possible demand on our third care, for 
Originality. One can indeed distort, but one can 
hardly invent, the eternal verities; and for this rea- 
son the one element of the novel that would best not 
undertake to be new is its philosophy. But there is 
another, and probably more important, kind of 



34 THE MODERN NOVEL 

Truth by Representation, which does interlock with 
the necessity of being original. The novelist makes 
use, whether he mean to or not, of general truths 
about the world and about man's life therein; but 
this fact is not so arresting as his citizenship in the 
largest, most universal state that has ever existed, 
the state of our common Human Nature. The novel- 
ist must provide something new in human character 
and personality, at the same time that he observes 
the universally experienced laws of animal behaviour, 
the common stock of motive and impulse, passion and 
sentiment. He must be master of similarity in dif- 
ference; he must acquaint us with new beings, the 
elements so mixed in them that we feel them as 
definite additions to our world, and yet he must weave 
them out of the old, old substances, the desires we 
have all known, the contradictions and incongruities 
that are parts of all of us — the human nature that 
we all partake of. The folk we meet in his pages 
must be themselves, yet like ourselves; their hearts 
must beat in echo to the common heart of mankind, 
yet somehow in a different, an individual and per- 
sonal rhythm. 

This achievement alone can be called "creative" 
in the most elemental sense known to literary art. 
The creation of a new character is akin to the stroke 
of cosmic creation which brings something out of 
nothing, substance out of the void and the breath of 
life out of the inert substance. If we consider the 
pre-eminence in our English imaginative literature 
of three names, Chaucer, Shakspere, Dickens, we 






THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 35 

shall find its secret in the host of complete, rounded, 
and original pieces of human nature which throng to 
our memory at the mention of those names. Their 
human creations represent the world, our world of 
action and emotion, all complete; and they represent 
themselves too, they are creatures that were never in 
the world before. 

For this elemental creative power there is no rival 
and no substitute. Ingenuity and experience can ac- 
count for originality of setting, the preparation of 
new hues and blends of local colour; ingenuity and 
labour can devise plots whose sequences shall seem 
new. But only the most impersonal and selfless 
genius can create a Pardoner, a Falstaff, a Mr. Sapsea, 
or — to add one other novelist who lives principally in 
his fewer created personalities — an Uncle Toby. 
Having this power, a great novelist can almost afford 
to lack everything else. It has been said of Dickens 
that his characters were good "so long as he could 
keep them out of his stories/' His minor characters 
are more alive than the major characters of most 
writers ; and we care little whether they carry on the 
story or not, so long as they consent to live on before 
us in that "perpetual summer of being themselves." 
Some critics have said that Laurence Sterne's prin- 
cipal stock-in-trade was his whimsical nicety in sala- 
cious innuendo. Not so: for his name would long 
since have been forgotten had he not affixed it to 
Uncle Toby, the real immortal. 

Shall we let Fielding speak for us once more, on 
this subject of Human Nature? 



36 THE MODERN NOVEL 

"The provision, then, which we have here [i. e., in 
Tom Jones] made is no other than Human Nature. 
Nor do I fear that my sensible reader, though most 
luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, 
because I have named but one article. The tortoise — 
as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, 
knows by much experience — besides the delicious cali- 
pash and calipee, contains many different kinds of 
food ; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in 
human nature, though here collected under one gen- 
eral name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will 
have sooner gone through all the several species of 
animal and vegetable food in the world, than an au- 
thor will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject. 

"An objection may perhaps be apprehended from 
the more delicate, that this dish is too common and 
vulgar; for what * else is the subject of all the ro- 
mances, novels, plays, and poems, with which the 
stalls abound? Many exquisite viands might be re- 
jected by the epicure, if it was a sufficient cause for 
his contemning of them as common and vulgar, that 
something was to be found in the most paltry alleys 
under the same name. In reality, true nature is as 
difficult to be met with in authors, as the Bayonne 
ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops. ' ' 



VI 



And now, the fourth and final matter, Artistic Fu- 
sion. There will be more to say about unity in the 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 37 

work of fiction when we come to some of the inter- 
esting problems of design; but at least I may throw 
out here, as obvious and self-explanatory, the sugges- 
tion that a skilfully written novel, however complex 
and various its elements, must be in some sense single, 
of a piece ; that the various elements must be woven 
somehow into a texture. Character, action, and scene 
must be parts of each other; at the least they must 
hold an interdependent relation, strike their several 
notes in a larger harmony. When I said a moment 
ago that we could almost concede Dickens his place 
on the strength and living originality of his charac- 
ters alone, I was trusting a good deal to the ' ' almost. ' ' 
The art of fiction, when really a fine art, cannot di- 
vorce character from action, any more than Thwackum 
and Square could divorce real ideas from conduct. 
And if, in addition to its scene and action and char- 
acter, the novel contain general truisms about life, 
those too must come legitimately — that is, logically 
and inevitably — out of the action, at once governing 
and explaining it ; they must not be simply the gratu- 
itous plastered-on opinions of the author. His af- 
fair is to create his puppets and then let them seem 
to manage their own destinies: let him not jerk them 
this way and that on wires palpably of his own con- 
triving. 

Of course really strong and persuasive action is 
that which seems to come out of the characters' own 
wills, or out of their own weaknesses. An action 
which we all recognize as the only one open to the given 
person in the given situation has artistic inevitability. 



38 THE MODERN NOVEL 

An act which divides our opinions and starts argu- 
ments among critics may be dubiously contrived, an 
artistic shortcoming; or the character may be ex- 
ceedingly complex or vacillating, so that inevitability 
is less determinate. An act which stamps its own pre- 
posterousness on our minds means that the artist has 
suffered a lapse of co-operation between his personae 
and his plot. These considerations are self-evident: 
one can do no more, and no less, than state them. 
But the obviousness of the principle does not lessen 
the difficulty of the practice; and the perfect fusion, 
on a grand scale, of action and character is an ob- 
jective attained by only a few supreme books in Eng- 
lish, and by only a handful of authors in the whole 
history of fiction. 

There is another relation which can be, though it 
usually is not, as intimate as that between action and 
character: that of scene or setting on one hand to 
action and character on the other. In the novel up 
to about 1860, we find comparatively little subtlety 
in the reported effects of the place upon the person. 
In Fielding, in Scott even, places are depicted only 
as a stage is set: that the drama may have a local 
habitation and not proceed in vacuo. At least such 
authors as these two are safe from the modern craze 
for local colour as a thing of independent interest, 
however irrelevant; that craze, now happily on the 
wane, is the ultimate debasement of background. 
Most of the local colourists of a decade ago ought to 
have written travelogues, not novels; one laughs with 
Mr. Ellis Parker Butler through the few pages of his 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 39 

skit, ' ' The Scenic Novel, ' ' x written at their expense, 
and suspects meanwhile that most of them are laugh- 
ing at themselves by this time. Mere local colour, 
most often painted on so thick that it scales, is de- 
cidedly not enough; nor did Mr. Kipling, who unin- 
tentionally set the vogue, ever pretend in his own 
practice that it was enough. One should either be a 
scientific explorer of the impalpable effects of region 
and clime, or else content one's self with the simple 
old fashion that treats scene-shifting as merely a 
necessary evil. 

But scene as mere background, for reality's sake 
or adornment's, is not the ultimate fusion of fine 
craftsmanship. Through the romantic revival, with 
its sudden interest in the external world of nature, 
and on through the period of humanitarianism, one 
finds a steadily increasing sense of the rapport be- 
tween man and man's habitat. Gray had this sense 
in the Elegy; Goldsmith had more than a smattering 
of it in The Deserted Village. It first crept into the 
novel, I believe, through the " School of Terror"; 
Mrs. Radcliffe among others used it for cunning, if 
somewhat tawdry, effects of mystery and horror. In 
the Irish novels of Miss Edgeworth, in the Scottish 
novels of Scott, the scene becomes, however uncon- 
sciously, something a little more than the picturesque 
frame it was meant to be; and when we come to 
Dickens we come to a host of characters who are the 
creatures of their environment. After this, the way 
is made straight to such pieces of atmosphere as the 

i The Scenic 'Novel. By Ellis Parker Butler. Atlantic 
Monthly, March, 1911. 



40 THE MODERN NOVEL 

Wuthering Heights of Emily Bronte and The Return 
of the Native of Hardy — to name perhaps the most 
significant developments in this kind on either side 
of George Eliot's earlier novels. The hither end of 
the tendency is to be found in those highly specialized 
stories of the Five Towns in which Mr. Arnold Ben- 
nett works out to great elaboration the theory that 
people derive their habits, their ideas, the texture 
of their personalities, from the source of their liveli- 
hood. Farther than this the novel can hardly go in 
interpreting character as suffused and permeated with 
the "spirit of place." 

From these few scattered historical items it will ap- 
pear that mere novelty of setting, or even mere schol- 
arly fulness of reproduction, is not an important end 
in itself — 'that is, for the novel. A skilful harmony 
between the simplest folk and the simplest environ- 
ment will communicate more, and endure longer, than 
the greatest elaboration without that harmony, as 
may be seen in the contrast between Silas Marner, 
the least pretentious of George Eliot's "novels of 
memory," and Romola, the most pretentious of her 
novels of scholarship. In Romola she does all that 
scholarship can do for the Florence of the Cinque- 
cento; she marshals it before us, a tremendous his- 
torical pageant. But through it walks Romola her- 
self, a great woman indeed, but rather a womanly 
British maiden of mid-Victorian time than a girl of 
Florence and the Renaissance. The incongruity de 
feats both the largeness of the design and the scholar- 
ship of the details. Similarly, the tales of Captain 



THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 41 

Marryatt are full of sea parlance, the rigging and 
maneuvering of ships; Captain Marryatt knows the 
sea, as a trade, as well as any one who has ever written 
of it. But he does not know the sea as a spell, as a 
creator of men in its own mysterious image; and to 
this day there is more authentic salt in one of Smol- 
lett's sailor men roaring out strange oaths in the 
tap-room of some quiet village ale-house many miles 
from the sea, than there is in all the ship's companies 
on all the decks of Captain Marryatt 's fiction. 



II 

ROMANCE 



Whoever talks with any consecutiveness about the 
history of fiction, or the ideals and processes of fic- 
tion, drops sooner or later into the terminology of a 
traditional classification, that represented by the two 
words "realism" and "romance." Already we have 
stumbled upon these two intrusive and irrepressible 
words, and heard them put in their claim to definition. 
I said, perhaps too debonairly, that the more roman- 
tic a novelist's theme inherently is, the more realistic 
must be his dealing with it, if his result is to do suc- 
cessful traffic with the reader's credulity. I need 
not bother to defend the statement, which will doubt- 
less commend itself to the intelligence as true in gen- 
eral within the meaning of its context, though open, 
like all general principles, to exception and modifica- 
tion. Nor need I recur again to realism of that 
lower order which governs the choice and transcrip- 
tion of authentic details and circumstances from life, 
and which we may call the realistic technique as dis- 
tinguished from the realistic spirit. But we are still 
very much in the challenging presence of the prob- 
lem in definition propounded by the word "romance," 
without some solution of which there is no rational 
approach to a tenable ground of interpretation and 
criticism. 

For my part, I confess that I name the romantic 

45 



46 THE MODERN NOVEL 

spirit with misgiving, and study it, or what I may 
provisionally speak of as being it, with bafflement. 
As a youngster of fifteen, devouring Fenimore 
Cooper as, I fancy, youngsters of fifteen still do, I was 
quite confident of my own ability to draw the tight 
straight line between one kind of fiction that is ro- 
mantic and nothing else, and another kind that is 
realistic and nothing else. But the slightly older 
youngster begins to see that there is a misty mid- 
region between romance and realism, and that the 
boundaries of the two are indefinable rather than 
precise, movable rather than fixed. And eventually 
he sees pure romance and pure realism as being like 
nothing so much as the invisible extremes, the infra- 
red and the ultra-violet, of the colour spectrum, which, 
being invisible to so coarse an organ as the sensual 
eye, may be said for rough pragmatic purposes not 
to exist. The million gradations and mixtures in 
between, they exist. And so do the million grada- 
tions and mixtures of romance and realism; but the 
more one reads and thinks about what one has read, 
the more one suspects that pure romance and pure 
realism are as the infra-red and the ultra-violet of 
the spectrum — concepts of the mind, practically at- 
tainable it may be in that consummation where the 
artist in words shall 

". . . splash at a seven-league canvas, with brushes of com- 
ets' hair," 

but seen in their purity thus far on no canvas of the 
finite and mortal novelist, nor in the transient flame 



ROMANCE y 47 



of any one of those beacons which the young adven- 
turing minds are for ever setting up on the changing 
shore-line of art. The poet and teller of tales whose 
line I have just quoted, himself a more than ordin- 
arily puzzling example of realism and romance min- 
gled, addresses himself to the True Romance as to a 
goddess and guide; but in the very phrases which 
pledge him to the True Romance he says, with one of 
the fine despairs of faith — 

"Thy face is far from this our war, 

Our call and counter-cry; 
I shall not find Thee quick and kind, 

Nor know Thee till I die. 
Enough for me in dreams to see 

And touch Thy garment's hem : 
Thy feet have trod so near to God 

I may not follow them." 

Herein he is like a mystic devotee groping after the 
unknowable, and half realizing the while that all the 
virtue is in the groping, not in the knowing. 

And so, as I talk about romance, I confess it is with 
growing doubts — not merely whether there is any ro- 
mance, but also, supposing romance to exist definably, 
whether the distinction between it and realism is as 
valuable as we sometimes try to make it out. A one- 
time President of Dartmouth College who made the 
opening prayer at a gathering of college presidents 
met to consider problems of academic administration 
(also, in its way, a difficult and indeterminate sub- 
ject) closed his invocation with these words, the sly 
humour of which could not, I think, have been wholly 



48 THE MODERN NOVEL 

lost on the Almighty: "0 Lord, preside over our 
deliberations; and may our conclusions be wise ones 
--so far as we come to any conclusions." There is 
room for the same attitude of intellectual humility 
in the consideration of romance. And at the end of 
all our discussing and denning, we need not feel 
wholly cheated if we discover that what we have dis- 
cussed and denned is not after all the romance we 
seek, but another, perhaps the highest, kind of real- 
ism. For if romance does not exist with all the im- 
portance we attach to it in our thought, if the spirit 
that animates creative effort in fiction is one and one 
only, then it is something to have discovered the limi- 
tations of our common categories and to have found 
the point at which our terminology breaks down. 



II 



So far, the argument goes along on a rather high 
plane. To descend: We may doubt the sway of 
romance as a spirit, but we hardly question the exist- 
ence or the prestige of romances. These we have in 
infinite bulk, subject to a hundred changing modes 
and conventions, 

"Part good, part bad; of bad the longer scroll." 

It is romance as a spirit, the ruling element common 
to all the works which we call romances, that needs 
investigating; a goal or ideal that has something to 
do with the purpose and the meaning of fiction. Ro- 



ROMANCE 49 



mance as a school or a fashion is traceable enough in 
literary history, if only one have the knowledge or the 
patience. It concerns the technique and the subjects 
of fiction, rather than its purpose and meaning; and 
for that reason we go at it cavalierly, knowing it for 
a counterfeit of the thing we seek, and not the thing 
itself. 

Even at these lower and lowest levels, romance is 
a complex thing to define, because the word is so vari- 
ously used, and made the half of so many antitheses. 
We know what the Romantic Movement was: it was 
a movement in revolt against classicism, authority, re- 
straint, formalism, and the ancient past, and toward 
individualism, socialism, humanitarianism, imagina- 
tion, nature, mysticism, and the mediaeval past; — 
and only incidentally was it a movement toward ro- 
mances. But we call a detective story a romance, lit- 
tle though it has to do with any of the crucial things 
of the Romantic Movement; and every one of these 
crucial things has as much to do with realism as with 
romance. When we say that Byron was a romantic 
poet, we use a word of known values, referable as it 
were to a sort of gold standard of meaning ; but when 
we say that Mrs. Radcliffe or Maturin or Scott was 
a romantic novelist, we do not know what system of 
currency we are handling, or what rates of exchange 
apply to it. We may mean something profoundly 
important ; or we may mean only that Mrs. Radcliffe 
invented her scenery instead of observing it, that 
Maturin tried to make you shiver instead of trying 
to make you laugh, that Scott wrote about Crusaders 



50 THE MODERN NOVEL 



and Cavaliers instead of about green-grocers and poli- 
ticians. It is easy enough to say and, on this lower 
plane of mere fashions, true enough that Scott and, 
after him, Stevenson were romantic ; Jane Austen and 
Thackeray and George Eliot realistic; Bulwer-Lytton 
romantic when he wrote Rienzi and realistic when he 
wrote My Novel. It is easy enough to say this; but 
it is much less easy to be sure just what we mean by 
it. All the common labels have their truth if we 
affix them suggestively enough, but they sometimes 
palpably refuse to stick ; they turn up at the corners. 
To exemplify : We say that romance has its inter- 
est more in actions than in persons; but that is true 
only of melodrama. We say that romance arbitrarily 
suppresses many common facts, whereas realism wel- 
comes all facts that are true ; but the basis of all art, 
realistic or romantic, is selection, and therefore ex- 
clusion. We say that romance is idealistic; but all 
great literature is idealistic with it — and moreover 
where is the idealism in the average detective "ro- 
mance"? We say that realism deals with the usual, 
romance with the unusual; but the usual of today 
is the unusual of tomorrow — and has Addison become 
a romantic because the coffee-house no longer exists, 
or can Stephen Crane's extraordinarily realistic 
story The Red Badge of Courage be turned into a 
romance by the sunrise of that remote day which shall 
see war archaic, obsolete? Clearly the technical di- 
visions of realistic and romantic do not stand or fall 
by such factitious matters. Similarly, most of the 
other common distinctions of text-book and class- 



EOMANCE 51 



room can be reduced to absurdity. Nor will it help 
us much to say that romance colours life whereas real- 
ism simply copies it; for good realism is not primarily 
photographic, and both romance and realism invent 
life. You can hardly copy what you have invented; 
you can only copy what some one else has invented — 
which is plagiarism. 

No: one cannot define even the mechanical traits 
and tendencies of romance by any such makeshift 
formula?. Nor will all one's inquiries be likely to 
bring a more substantially paying answer than this: 
— Every age has its dominant qualities, and wearies 
of them. Those qualities may be actually the virtues 
of the age, but it wearies of them just the same: 
nothing bores an age more inexorably than its own 
virtues in excess, become static and in-growing. 
Thereupon arises the need, or at least the demand, 
for a counter-irritant, taking the form of whatever, 
being most remote and therefore most seductive, re- 
minds the age of what it would like to be and makes 
it forget what it is — or at least what it seems to itself, 
which may be a very different thing. That remote 
and seductive ideal is the romance of the age, and 
the works dominated by that ideal are its romances. 
The supreme charm for us all is in something which is 
somewhere else — in the clouds, or on the inaccessible 
horizon, or in the past, or behind the veil of the fu- 
ture. You have to have only a fairly large number 
of people all wanting the same thing which they have 
not got, to create the conventions of a school of ro- 
mance. Those conventions will change as soon as the 



52 THE MODERN NOVEL 

people have got what they wanted or, more probably, 
ceased to want it ; and then their romances, so far as 
they referred to that want and nothing else, will cease 
to be, or will remain to later ages as the property of 
immature or restless minds who know not what they 
want. That is why the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe 
ceased to be everybody's romances and became the 
romances of boarding-school girls. That is why Mr. 
W. L. George says * that Scott — in whom Mr. George 
sees only the trappings and conventions — is "reduced 
to a juvenile circulation. ' ' 

This, then, is the kernel of our notion of romance 
according to the popular classifications: It is the 
product of a set of conventions based on a popular 
demand, the reaction of an epoch against that in itself 
with which familiarity has bred contempt. We call 
this work realism, and that romance, first, last, and 
always by purely mechanical, transient, and often 
flimsy conventions. 

To illustrate: The 17th century, without hav- 
ing undergone any real change of conscience, sub- 
mitted itself to a set of suppressions, political, social, 
and religious, which became more and more distaste- 
ful. There was presently to be a wide-spreading 
revolt against the Puritan spirit, the puritanical life ; 
it was to take such forms as the Restoration, the licen- 
tious Restoration drama, the satires of Butler, and the 
pseudo-classicism of Dryden. But before the time was 
ripe for these, there came a sort of false dawn of 

i In Anatole France (Writers of the Day) . By W. L. George. 
New York: Henry Holt and Co, 



ROMANCE 53 



emancipation, of which false dawn one of the very 
first rays was the so-called "heroic romance," first 
imported from Paris in free translation, later closely 
imitated in London. The Grand Cyrus of the Scud- 
erys is the best known of the importations; the 
^retina, a juvenile work of Sir George Mackenzie, 
famous jurist and founder of the Advocates' Library 
of Edinburgh, is selected by Professor Sir Walter 
Raleigh to represent the native crop. In all the works 
of this school, the 17th century protests against 
its own life of bourgeois stuffiness by imagining for 
itself characters of impossible grandeur and magnilo- 
quence, Treavily brocaded kings, queens, and nobles 
who strut and bombast their way through scenes 
neither ancient nor modern, speaking a language never 
spoken by man — no, nor woman neither — and pat- 
terned of conceits more affected than those of Euphues 
himself. Congreve, a born realist, said in the Preface 
to his Incognita: "Romances are generally composed 
of the constant Loves and invincible Courages of 
Hero's and Heroines, Kings and Queens, Mortals of 
the first Rank, and so forth: where lofty Language 
miraculous Contingencies and impossible Perform- 
ances, elevate and surprise the Reader into a giddy 
Delight, which leaves him flat upon the Ground, when- 
ever he gives off, and vexes him to think how he has 
suffer 'd himself to be pleased and transported, con- 
cern 'd and afflicted at the several passages he has 
read." Thus even Congreve, separated by only a few 
years from this effeminate school — the Aretina was 
dedicated, as Professor Raleigh notes, "to all the 



54 THE MODERN NOVEL 

Ladies of this Nation" — could see what we see more 
plainly still, that the "heroic romance" was really 
most unheroic bombast, a thing consisting exclusively 
of conventions wrought out of a momentary desire, 
and as ephemeral as the desire itself. 



Ill 



The history of literature seems to show that ro- 
mance based on conventions always does one of two 
things, both of which prove the infirmity of romance 
so bred and so nourished. It either sinks into the 
ground, leaving hardly any trace, as this "heroic 
romance" of the 17th century did, or else it finds its 
way to some renewal of which the most important in- 
gredient is not the romantic convention but the realis- 
tic feeling and purpose. The 18th century "School 
of Terror," the novel's contribution to the Romantic 
Revival, illustrates this second possible destiny. 

The Romantic Revival sought after the mediaeval 
spirit — often, it must be admitted, seeking it where it 
was not. The first or pseudo-classical part of the 
century used the word "6otJuc--..to signify whatever 
was repellently bizarre, grotesque, and mediaevally 
ugly; the second or romanticist part of the century 
used the same word to denote the seductiveness, the 
mystery, and the glamour of the mediaeval past. 
Gothicism came to be a fad about the time that 
Horace Walpole, brilliant politician and man of wit, 
built his famous country house in imitation of a 



ROMANCE 55 



feudal castle (a very bad piece of architecture, by 
Ruskin's standard of beauty-in-utility). Walpole 
also wrote The Castle of Otranto, and so became the 
first to lend fashionable countenance to the tribe of 
ghosts and apparitions that " squeaked and gib- 
bered" and groaned in musty vaults and dim win ' 
swept corridors until the time when Jane Austei s 
Northanger Abbey let in the sunlight of comrm l 
sense upon them and proved them pasteboard and 
phosphorus. We wonder now how the poet Gray 
could have shivered all night over the ghostly mock- 
heroics of Otranto, and especially how he could have 
owned up to it; we wonder how The Old English 
Baron of Clara Reeve and The Mysteries of Udolpho 
of Mrs. Radcliffe could have set a generation of teeth 
chattering. To us, these and the other works of their 
sort mean simply the discontent of the 18th century 
with its own curtailed imaginative life, its materialis- 
tic and rather grossly hearty physical life; it wanted 
to get out of itself into the past, and any readiest 
naive misconception of the past would do. 

Nevertheless, the School of Terror, unlike the heroic 
romance, did lead to something. It left a double leg- 
acy, the first and most important half of which was 
the rationally and nationally historical fiction of 
Scott. It was but a step from the unreal past peopled 
with ghosts to the real past peopled with people. 
Scott, who was very genuinely and painstakingly an 
antiquarian and archaeologist before he was a novel- 
ist or even a poet, turned the convention of medieval- 
ism into something other and greater than a conven- 



56 THE MODERN NOVEL 

tion. He kept the glamour of the past but not its 
ghosts; he let that glamour clothe and surround folk 
who are as real as you or I, and when he wrote about 
a ghost he was likeliest to do it as a joke — as in 
Wandering Willie's Tale. 1 In short, Scott saved some 
of the conventions of romance by the amount and kind 
of faithful realism which he put with them. We give 
his tales their label of "historical romance" because 
of the superficial convention by which it is easiest to 
identify them — very much as it is easiest to identify 
one's partner at a dance by her clothes. But one 
enjoys one's partner, at least one does if one is lucky, 
for her wit or grace or good sense; and we read the 
tales of Scott because they give us the Crusades, 
Feudalism, Cavalier and Roundhead, the Covenanters, 
Scotland, a whole pageant of diversified human na- 
ture — in a word, life. Whether it is being lived or 
has been lived makes little difference : underneath the 
trappings and the shifting attendant circumstances, 
it is all of the same stuff. It is the revelation of 
sameness, not the difference of dress, that counts — and 
that revelation is, in the profoundest sense, realism. 

No need to debate the more minute problem of 
whether the Middle Ages were actually as Scott por- 
trayed them. They are real enough so that he takes 
us into them for the sake of what he can show us there ; 
whereas Walpole merely takes us out of the present 
for the sake of what he cannot show us there. Scott 
means the rich sufficiency of the historic past; the 

i In Redgauntlet, Letter Eleventh of the Introduction. 






ROMANCE 57 



School of Terror means the unsatisfying emptiness of 
the present. 

We classify Scott, then, as a romancer, but value 
and cling to him for his fundamental realism. It is 
not a thoroughgoing realism; but what there is of it 
is truth. 

This discrepancy in our treatment of Scott brings 
us to the very important question: How can 
the accoutrements and the machinery of romance be 
made to serve a purpose and a meaning essentially re- 
alistic ? What objective of the great realists do Scott 
and other romancers find it easier to reach through the 
convention of their chosen medium, romance? The 
answer brings us very near to the point where the 
duality of realism and romance disappears and the 
two merge. 

All great art deals somehow with the strangeness of 
things. Under the most striking portrait, the most 
impressionistic interpretation of a landscape, the most 
fantastic piece of humour, the most intimate and faith- 
ful transcription of man's individual or social life, 
there lies a sense that any aspect of reality has only 
to be known through and through, or from the right 
angle, to become seductively mysterious, obscurely 
wonderful. The better we know things, the more 
amazing they are. Of this part of the credo of all 
good imaginative art, there is a consummate expres- 
sion in the following words by one of America's great- 
est, and least known, tellers of strange tales : 

"It is to him of widest knowledge, of deepest feel- 



58 THE MODERN NOVEL 

ing, of sharpest observation and insight, that life is 
most crowded with figures of heroic stature, with 
spirits of dream, with demons of the pit, with graves 
that yawn in pathways leading to the light, with ex- 
istences not of earth, both malign and benign — min- 
isters of grace and ministers of doom. The truest 
eye is that which discerns the shadow and the por- 
tent, the dead hands reaching, the light that is the 
heart of the darkness, the sky 'with dreadful faces 
thronged and fiery arms.' The truest ear is that 
which hears 

'Celestial voices to the midnight air, 
Sole, or responsive each to the other's note, 
Singing— ' 

not 'their great Creator,' but not a negro melody, 
either; no, nor the latest favourite of the drawing- 
room. In short, he to whom life is not picturesque, 
enchanting, astonishing, terrible, is denied the gift 
and faculty divine, and being no poet can write no 
prose. ' ' x 

All the great effects of literature depend on some 
sort of paradox, surprise, redistribution of emphasis, 
or re-reading of the obvious and superficial meanings 
of things. The general message of art is that things 
are not what they seen] : and the temporary formulas 
of art are simply this or that man 's convenient way 
of expressing this truth. Realism is the fashionable 
formula of this hour, romance has been that of some 
other hours. 

*The Opinionator, pp. 244-5. New York and Washington: 
The Neale Publishing Co., 1911. 



ROMANCE 59 



Now, it is obvious that the historical romancer 
finds ready and at his disposal an extraordinary 
measure of this paradox or inverted emphasis. He 
finds it in the one most typical and traditional arti- 
fice of the historical novel : the subordination of great 
folk whom we distantly know in history, and the 
emergence of other folk whom we have never heard 
of. Richard the Lion-Hearted exists not for Saladin 
and Limoges, but for Ivanhoe ; Savonarola is brought 
into being, not as revivalist, politician, and martyr, 
but as a decisive factor in the moral history of Ro- 
mola; Erasmus the great humanist becomes a little 
child that we may read the love story of his parents. 
Great things that we think of ordinarily as having 
wrought certain great ends exist now for other and 
lesser ends. And if the revised version in the ro- 
mance is less true to fact, we know in our hearts that 
it is much more true to life. 

The effect is as that of sudden personal knowledge 
of a famous man. You idealize him or denounce him, 
follow his career, vote for him, vote against him, read 
his books or review them, see him through a mist of 
his importance and inaccessibility : then you spend 
a week-end in the same house with him, and find that 
your personage is after all a person. He reads the 
Barchester novels once a year, likes to whittle out 
toys for children with his jack-knife, and thinks your 
father's old teacher of Roman History was the great- 
est man he ever met. Your personage has suddenly 
conferred a mysterious greatness upon ordinary things 
through their association with him, and humanity upon 



60 THE MODERN NOVEL 

himself through his interest in them. Proportion is 
restored ; he is part of the life you know ; and for the 
tirst time you begin to see him somewhat as he sees 
himself, and to know what are his real realities. 

Some such effect as this comes out. of historical 
novels in which the heroes are other than the heroes 
of history. Great events and great personages win a 
sudden new glamour by coming near to us ; and little 
events and persons are magnified by being brought 
near to them. The pulse quickens as the novelist puts 
us suddenly face to face, by a twist of romantic arti- 
fice, with the one strangest yet most familiar thing 
in the world, the miracle of our common humanity. 
That swift raising of a veil or an iron mask, the chief 
trick of our romancer's entire bagful, is accomplished 
then for a purpose altogether realistic — the revelation 
of things as they are, and of the strangeness of their 
being so. 



IV 



In the face of such considerations, I find it possible 
to answer in but one way the question whether we 
value "romantic" fiction most for the romance in it 
or for the realism. Romance is only a system of con- 
ventions; and if only those conventions are present, 
we do not permanently value the product at all. 
Great or enduring romance makes use of those con- 
ventions for precisely such ends as belong to the 
realist. Romance concerns, then, the medium, the 
means and technique, of fiction, and has the least 



ROMANCE 61 



possible to do with its purpose and meaning. For 
the sake of convenient categories, we say that the 
realistic use of remote and unfamiliar material is 
romance, and that the realistic use of near 
and familiar material is realism. But this simply 
means that one writer knows best, as Scott did, the 
remote and unfamiliar ; another, as his contemporary 
Jane Austen did, the near and familiar. Each trav- 
els where he knows the trails; but there is only one 
destination worth talking about. Speak of "ro- 
mance" as you will in discussing the how and 
whence of fiction, you are necessarily talking about 
realism when you discuss its why, its purpose and 
meaning. Romance is only a specialized technique; 
that is, a somewhat circuitous way of getting to a 
destination. All fiction is truly great in so far as it 
is realistic in spirit, other things being equal; and 
there are no true artists but those who are at bottom 
realists. 

So at least we seem to make out when we consult 
that side of the School of Terror which leads to the 
historical novel as written by Scott. When we in- 
spect its other legacy, of horror and "spinal shiver," 
the psychic and the phantasmal, we find again that 
the mere conventions of romance, in order to save 
their lives at all, had to be translated into terms of 
realism. The medievalism of the School of Terror 
leads to Scott; the psychic abnormality of the School 
of Terror leads to Poe and Hawthorne. We shall 
have traced in our minds the symmetrical curve of 
the modern ghost story if we see that it had its life 



62 THE MODERN NOVEL 

in the realism of The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, its 
romantic death in Walpole and the other Terrorists, 
and its complete resurrection in such things as The 
Turn of the Screw oi iicnry James and Ambrose 
Bierce's tales of the ghostly and the ghastly. This is 
the complete cycle in outline. The renewal of the 
psychic begins in England with Charles Robert 
Maturin, whose Melmoth the Wanderer is perhaps 
oftener referred to than read, though it is still pos- 
sible to read it with interest. On the Continent, de 
la Mott-Fouque and Jean Paul Richter are the names 
which correspond ; that is, the names which imply Poe 
and Hawthorne a little later. These two American 
masters are midway of the upward curve. Using in- 
deed the old bottles of supernalurali^m and terror, 
they fill them nevertheless with the new wine of some- 
thing akin to scientific interpretation. They are half- 
way back to realism; and it is the infiltration of 
realism into their romance which makes them live. 

It may seem a loose and rather wild classification 
which puts Poe and Hawthorne together, antithetical 
as they are at many points — the one a Puritan in in- 
heritance and temperament if not in code, the other 
as nearly unmoral as human nature can be, and with- 
out any moorings in either place or time. But let us 
see. In their separate ways they are both most ab- 
sorbed, the one intensely, the other deeply, in the 
meaning and the results of sin in the individual life, 
and most preoccupied with the stress and mystery of 
man's relation with his own heart. The message of 
both comes to something like the inexorable hounding 



ROMANCE 63 



of conscience — 'though Hawthorne is interested in con- 
science as an agent of the moral law, Poe only as an 
agent of torture, a screw to be applied to human will 
until it cracks. One is a moral judge, the other a 
moral anatomist ; but the art of either finds its centre 
in human sin, its nature and its inevasible conse- 
quences. In The Scarlet Letter, as Professor Wood- 
berry has said, "sin now staining the soul ... is the 
theme; and the course of the story concerns man's 
dealing with sin, in his own breast or the breasts of 
others." 1 In The House of the Seven Gables the 
burden of past misdoings presses down upon the life 
of the present, to render it sinister and futile. 
" 'Shall we never, never get rid of this law?' " cries 
Holgrave. " 'It lies upon the Present like a giant's 
dead body.' " In the earlier of these stories man 
struggles pettily to evade the consequences of his own 
sin ; in the later, he is foredoomed by ancestral wrongs 
which are beyond righting. 

With Poe, this sense of the omnipresence of evil 
takes two special forms : first, a tireless interest in that 
evil perversity of human nature which makes each 
man, as Oscar Wilde said, "kill the thing he loves" in 
order to torture his own soul; and, second, a vivid 
appreciation of the disintegrating effect of remorse 
upon the sanity. Poe trying to create pure fantasy, 
as in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, is too jejune 
for interest ; but we remember the Poe who understood 
the paradox that there is a perverse pleasure in self- 

1 Nathaniel Hawthorne (American Men of Letters Series), p. 
193. By George E. Woodberry. Boston and New York: 
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1902. 



64 THE MODERN NOVEL 

inflicted pain, and the truism that no man can long 
live sanely with the darkest elements of his own na- 
ture. And this is Poe the realist. 

Both writers falsify the truth of life by suppression 
of part. Hawthorne expresses the moral rigour of 
cisatlantic Puritanism, but not its hope of forgiveness 
and redemption; Poe expresses the soul's capacity for 
evil and for remorse, but not its capacity for 
renunciation, noble endeavour, and self-discipline. 
In both, the abnormal predominates; but so far as 
they continue to be read on their merits as authors, 
not merely for their prestige as classics, they are read 
because the abnormality which they portrayed is ac- 
tually there, a pervasive and inescapable part of life. 
Their artificial suppressions and their lack of actual 
knowledge of what life is may together cost them 
length of literary life ; but while they live at all, they 
live because they traced human impulse and motive 
inward to dark secret sources. 

Starting then with the two chiefly romantic impulses 
of the School of Terror, medievalism and psychic 
horror, we find that each saves itself by becoming 
transmuted into something else which is not ulti- 
mately romantic at all; and that the amount of sal- 
vation is just about in proportion to the amount of 
realism acquired. The vague Gothicism of the 18th 
century becomes the true historical sense of Scott ; its 
monsters become the balanced human beings of Scott ; 
its apparitions turn into the spectres of old sins come 
back to prey on the soul ; its re-echoing ghostly voices 
become conscience. The historical novel explores 



ROMANCE 65 



widely and freely among outward realities of space 
and past time; the fiction of Poe and Hawthorne ex- 
plores deeply within, subjecting the heart and the 
brain to analysis of whatever is most corrosive there. 
Still other strata of our fiction have demonstrably this 
same romantic foundation ; but they all alike abandon 
more and more the strangeness of life as it is not for 
the still greater strangeness of life as it is. 



Perhaps we have come too long a way round for so 
simple a result. It is obvious enough a priori that 
(all fiction is based on life, and that the worth of the 
fiction is contingent on the fulness and truth of the 
vision of life. Fulness and truth in the vision, these 
are the chief tests of a great realism; and if great 
realism happen to fall in a romantic school or vogue, 
that makes ultimately but little difference. The 
realist loves life, as his own eye sees it, too well to miss 
any of the savour of its actuality ; he whom we call a 
romancer loves life too well not to array it in fine ves- 
tures, shape it to the mould of a heroic tradition, and 
make it trail clouds of glory. This is the unimportant 
and passing difference. But they both love life. 
That is the essential similarity; and it is more im- 
portant than any difference. 

If then we come upon a piece of literature which 
distorts the nature of life, we shall have to call it bad 
literature; that is, non-realistic literature. For the 



66 THE MODERN NOVEL 

test of realism, which is the test of excellence, is fidel- 
ity to the nature of life. Romance is a kind of real- 
ism which undertakes to reveal the nature of life 
while claiming, perhaps, some licence in its handling 
of the mere facts of life.^ Realism undertakes to be 
faithful both to the nature and the facts of life, and 
needs, as we have seen, to discharge both of its re- 
sponsibilities. If what we call romance distort both 
the facts and the nature of life, it fails and dies ; and 
the meaning of its failure is not that it was bad ro- 
mance, recreant to facts, but that it was bad realism, 
recreant to the truth which is above the facts. 

I have meant not so much to deny the difference 
between realism and romance as to belittle its signifi- 
cance. There is a difference; and it is of some in- 
cidental importance to the novelist that he shall be in 
the vogue of his generation, for the fashion is prodigi- 
ously important to the commerce between producer 
and public, and many a romancer has missed his mark 
by using a sort of ammunition which went with older 
firearms, long superseded. But we are speaking of 
the target ; and here, we insist, the white is one thing 
and one only — the truth and the meaning of life as 
men and womenlive it. 

Consider, for an illustration and a test, a page of 
Scott, from A Legend of Montrose. Angus M'Aulay 
has dined in London at the house of Sir Miles Mus- 
grave, where were put on the table six candlesticks 
of solid silver ; and Angus, touched in his Scotsman 's 
local pride, has sworn that he has ' ' mair candlesticks, 
and better candlesticks, in his ain castle at hame, than 






ROMANCE 67 



were ever lighted in a hall in Cumberland," and has 
backed up his oath by the wager of a sum which he 
does not possess. Behold the outcome, in the Scottish 
halls of M'Aulay:— 

1 ' Donald, as they were speaking, entered, with rather 
a blither face than he might have been expected to 
wear, considering the impending fate of his master's 
purse and credit. 'Gentlemens, her dinner is ready, 
and her candles are lighted too,' said Donald, with a 
strong guttural emphasis on the last clause of his 
speech. 

" 'What the devil can he mean?' said Musgrave, 
looking to his countryman. 

"Lord Menteith put the same question with his 
eyes to the Laird, which M'Aulay answered by shak- 
ing his head. 

"A short dispute about precedence somewhat de- 
layed their leaving the apartment. Lord Menteith 
insisted upon yielding up that which belonged to his 
rank, on consideration of his being in his own country, 
and of his near connection with the family in which 
they found themselves. The two English strangers, 
therefore, were first ushered into the hall, where an 
unexpected display awaited them. The large oaken 
table was spread with substantial joints of meat, and 
seats were placed in order for the guests. Behind 
every seat stood a gigantic Highlander, completely 
dressed, and armed after the fashion of his country, 
holding in his right hand his drawn sword, with the 
point turned downwards, and in the left a blazing 
torch made of the bog-pine, This wood, found in the 



68 THE MODERN NOVEL 

morasses, is so full of turpentine, that when split 
and dried, it is frequently used in the Highlands in- 
stead of candles. The unexpected and somewhat 
startling apparition was seen by the red glare of the 
torches, which displayed the wild features, unusual 
dress, and glittering [swords?] of those who bore 
them, while the smoke, eddying up to the roof of the 
hall, overcanopied them with a volume of vapour. 
Ere the strangers had recovered from their surprise, 
Allan stepped forward, and pointing with his 
sheathed broadsword to the torch-bearers, said, in a 
deep and stern tone of voice, ' Behold, gentlemen caval- 
iers, the chandeliers of my brother 's house, the ancient 
fashion of our ancient name; not one of these men 
knows any law but their chief's command — Would 
you dare to compare to them in value the richest 
ore that ever was dug out of the mine? How say 
you, cavaliers ? — is your wager won or lost ? ' 

' ' ' Lost, lost, ' said Musgrave gayly — ' my own silver 
candlesticks are all melted and riding on horseback by 
this time, and I wish the fellows that enlisted were 
half as trusty as these. — Here, sir,' he added to the 
chief, 'is your money; it impairs Hall's finances and 
mine somewhat, but debts of honour must be settled.' 

" 'My father's curse upon my father's son,' said 
Allan, interrupting him, 'if he receives from you one 
penny! It is enough that you claim no right to ex- 
act from him what is his own.' 

' 'Lord Menteith eagerly supported Allan's opinion, 
and the elder M'Aulay readily joined, declaring the 
whole to be a fool's, business, and not worth speaking 



ROMANCE 69 



more about. The Englishmen, after some courteous 
opposition, were persuaded to regard the whole as a 
joke. 

" 'And now, Allan,' said the Laird, ' please to re- 
move your candles; for, since the Saxon gentlemen 
have seen them, they will eat their dinner as com- 
fortably by the light of the old tin sconces, without 
scorn fishing them with so much smoke.' 

"Accordingly, at a sign from Allan, the living chan- 
deliers, recovering their broadswords, and holding 
the point erect, marched out of the hall, and left the 
guests to enjoy their refreshments." 1 

There are all the trappings of the romantic, in- 
cluding the deliberate effort to work the scene up to 
a heightened intensity which is to fiction what elo- 
quence is to speech. But in what is the chief effect? 
Is it in the picturesqueness, the ornate and martial 
machinery of the episode, the stage fittings, or even 
in the triumph of the character who enlists our sym- 
pathy — this last one of the major conventions of ro- 
mance? Or is it in the loyalty of the brother who 
has contrived the ruse, the most human joy of the 
aged servitor in his master's triumph and the op- 
ponent's discomfiture, the debonair and courtly grace 
of the good loser, and above all the ringing truth be- 
hind the whole affair, that metals are dross when 
weighed in the balance against men? In these latter 
things, to be sure; and so always in such scenes in- 
volving artificially heightened effects, if they are suc- 
cessful. 



i A Legend of Montrose, Chapter Fourth. 



70 THE MODERN NOVEL 

The novelist's loyalty to life varies (shall we say?) 
as man's love for woman. The realist is the indulgent 
lover who would have his mistress as she is, who 
feels that any change would be a loss, because it would 
interfere with her identity, make her less completely 
herself. Your romancer is the passionate lover who 
cannot bear that his mistress should be in any wise 
less than his thought of her ; he covets for her all good 
things, sees in her all possibilities ; he wants her to be, 
not exactly someone else, but as it were more in- 
tensely and exclusively herself. He is like a man who 
exaggerates the truth for sheer love of the truth. 
To borrow and adapt a phrase, the romancer exag- 
gerates life in the direction of itself. But both 
realist and romancer must be impersonal: they must 
love life^ and not merely themselves. The historical 
novel must take us out of the present because there 
is so much for us in the past — not simply tu take us 
out of the present. If what the romancer provides be 
only an easy way of emotional escape, then he is serv- 
ing, not the True Romance, but only a shallow, vain, 
and egoistic spirit which we call by another and less 
honourable name. Between that lesser spirit and 
clean romance, or clean realism either, there is, as we 
shall see, implacable war. But there is no war be- 
tween romance and realism, any more than there is 
between true science and true religion. 



Ill 



SENTIMENTALISM 



On some sort of love for the nature of life rests, 
then, all sound romance, all sound realism. There 
are many kinds of love. The novelist may love life as 
a mistress ''uncertain, coy, and hard to please," but 
worth the knowing and the serving for all that, and 
on her own terms; he may be in two minds whether 
to idealize her at a distance or to defy disenchantment 
in the nearest intimacy, like Meredith's lover who 

"Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free" ; 

or he may trust and give himself completely up to 
her, in the sure knowledge that, though she may both 
' ' bruise and bless, ' ' he can have the full blessing only 
as he accepts the bruises. There are many kinds of 
love: but, for the novelist, only this one mistress. 
And his fundamental loyalty to life is the same 
whether he tend to interpret life realistically or to 
exalt it romantically. 

Now, it happens, as I have just hinted, that the 
romantic novelist is the more subject to a certain 
grave temptation or danger: the danger of substi- 
tuting self-love for love of life, and of interpreting 
the world exclusively as a ministry to self-delight. 
Professor Irving Babbitt characterizes the romantic 
lover in poetry by comparing him, in the terms of a 
not too celebrated mot, to the domestic cat which 

73 



74 THE MODERN NOVEL 

rubs its body against your leg: the cat does not love 
you, it " loves itself on you." So the romantic lover 
may prize his mistress, not for what she is, but for 
her reflection of him, her subtle and unanalysable 
appeal to his own vanity — or to his own humility, 
which may be only his vanity inverted. And so the 
novelist may, if there be too little of the impersonal in 
his fibre, love himself on life, and give us, for all his 
and our pains, not so much a reading of what life is 
or may be as an exhibition of his own private needs 
and greeds, predilections and aversions, prides and 
shames. He may part company with the realist, who 
says : "This is beauty, because it is truth," and with 
the romancer, who says : ' ' This is truth, because it is 
beauty"; — he may part company with both, and say 
tacitly no more than "This is what I enjoy." In 
short, he may let himself be animated by that shallow, 
vain, and egoistic spirit which we call sentimentalism ; 
the spirit which produces a counterfeit idealism, a 
spurious realism, compound of self plus emotion. 
Because the romancer has a freer hand with the cir- 
cumstances, and is less rigidly bound by what he sees 
before his eyes, he is the more likely to stumble into 
this pitfall of self; and that is why we may call the 
spirit of sentimentalism an underbred country cousin 
of romance. 

Sentimentalism, a sickly and corrosive thing, is 
enormously important in the history of literature, and 
especially of British literature; so important that al- 
most any episode of the development of our fiction 
might be recounted as a struggle of sentimentalism 



SENTIMENTAL ISM 75 

against its counter-agents. He who should undertake 
to tell the history of sentimental ism in the novel 
would stand committed to a complete history of the 
novel ; for in each generation the sentimental spirit is 
so enlaced with the general evolution of fiction that 
there is no story left to tell except that of the senti- 
mental spirit in its struggle to survive against strong 
opposition. Everything that is not for sentimental- 
ism is against it, and has been so ever since, in the 
tremendous decade which gave the English novel its 
modern shape, Richardson sentimentalized his way 
into the popular heart and Fielding took up the pen 
of satire to drive him out. The clash between Pamela 
and Joseph Andrews recurs, in one way or another, 
from decade to decade — not so spectacularly perhaps, 
because hardly ever again with so near an approach 
to equality between the contenders, but nevertheless 
demonstrably and implacably. The man of feeling 
and the man of reflection have their truces ; hardly, as 
yet, a permanent peace. 

Sentimentalism is, however, somewhat more than 
feeling. If it had to do merely with displays of 
sensibility, the exhibition of tender and often neurotic 
emotions inadequately grounded in ideas, the story of 
it might be a long one, but it could hardly be a very 
subtle one. The anatomist of the sentimental cultus 
beholds his real difficulty when he notes that senti- 
mentalism is interpenetrated with other substances, 
many of them the most respectable, and that some of 
its manifestations are of a sort to counterfeit what- 
ever we most prize in motive and conduct. Senti- 



76 THE MODERN NOVEL 

mentalism is, indeed, to begin with, a saturation with 
sensibility, the very dew-point of the emotional. But 
that is only the beginning of it. After we have taken 
sufficient account of sentimentalism as hyperesthesia, 
we find other expressions of it past numbering. 

Of these others, I may single out four, as being 
perhaps the most important here, through their 
prevalence in literature. — 

First, the spirit of self-righteousness. The self- 
righteous man may indeed love good conduct; but it 
is his own good conduct that he loves, and more be- 
cause it is his own than because it is good. This is 
the spirit that pities the sinful because they are so 
far beneath us who pity them — we think how wretched 
we should be in their place. It is also the spirit 
that philanthropizes and confers benefits through self- 
love. To give material succour is to bask in the glow 
of one's own goodness — and it is so easy to purchase 
merit thus ! 

Secondly, the spirit of vanity or grandiloquence or 
bombast. Mr. Chesterton has arraigned one of its 
modern tricks in a little essay called Demagogues and 
Mystagogues. 1 This is the spirit that identifies one's 
self in a proprietary way with one's profession or 
one's special interests. Fielding's doctors quarrel 
learnedly together about how the arm should be set, 
while the patient lies in torture, and dispute over the 
corpse to settle which killed him, because their own 
dignity must be upheld whatever becomes of the sci- 

i In All Things Considered. By G. K. Chesterton. New 
York: John Lane Co. MCMIX. 



SENTIMENTALISM 77 

ence of medicine; lawyers deliver their paid opinions 
in a jargon which none can understand, because their 
own majesty comes above that of the law; the school- 
master talks about education as though he were its 
patron saint, the dilettante about art as though it 
were a helpless orphan committed to his care, and the 
clergyman about God as though he were a benevolent 
and rather more responsible elderly relative of God — 
say, a maiden aunt. An inflated, puffed-up spirit 
this, that tries to dignify itself by ownership of that 
which is beyond any personal ownership. 

Thirdly, the self-deception which we call hypocrisy. 
For probably any consistent hypocrite is essentially a 
self-deceiver. No man can dispense in the long run 
with belief in himself; and hence he misreads his 
own motives, forgets whatever would confute him if 
he remembered it, and invents the most plausibly un- 
selfish motives for his self-seeking. The young lady 
continues to enjoy her roast lamb and be horrified at 
the trade of butchering, and thinks quite well of her- 
self in both connections; Theobald and Christina — I 
am referring here to Samuel Butler's posthumous 
classic The Way of All Flesh — continue to torture 
their son, out of a dubious mixture of self-righteous- 
ness, innate love of cruelty, and the sense of their 
own power and authority, and persuade themselves 
that they are doing it all for the good of the son. 

Fourthly, the spirit of shallow optimism, ihat sees 
everything in a beautiful mist of "rose-pink" (Mere- 
dith's word) ; that is always talking about "the sordid 
things of life" (meaning things which are not pretty) ; 



78 THE MODERN NOVEL 

that creates all the scores of sugar -plum-angel men, 
women, and children — especially children, the Sand- 
fords and Little Evas and Pollyannas of sentimental 
fiction, precocious infants with a diseased passion for 
making you cheerful and good: — the spirit that says 
tacitly, "This is the world I made: see how much 
nicer ii^ is than that dismal real world of obstinate 
facts and problems without solutions! If you don't 
like my world better than that, it must be that you 
have an evil, sordid mind." 

These four spirits — self-righteousness, vanity, hy- 
pocrisy, and the fashionable optimism — are all senti- 
mental: they all set up the first person singular as 
above the impersonal law of life, and study the world, 
if they study it at all, only to project themselves into 
it for the self-satisfied thrill of rediscovering them- 
selves there. The sentimentalist will actually inflict 
pain on himself for the pleasure of seeing himself 
bear it heroically; he will tempt others into despite- 
fully using and persecuting him, in order to anoint 
himself with the soothing oils of righteous indignation 
and self-pity. The peculiar insidiousness of this sen- 
timentalism is, in fact, that it nearly always concerns 
itself with well-meaning and well-doing, and by its 
fruits it is at times well-nigh indistinguishable from 
the most self-disciplined and impersonal rule of life. 

II 

It will be seen that these subtler manifestations of 
sentimentalise are here denned as simply effects of 






SENTIMENTALISM 79 

the egoism inherent in man, and with little or no 
reference to the goodness or badness of the actual 
conduct involved or advocated. And the definition 
will, I think, do all that may be asked of it. Senti- 
mentalism is primarily not a sort of conduct, but a 
sort of spirit behind conduct ; and the same acts may 
be prompted now by a sentimental attitude, again by 
a really humane or social spirit. Emerson's precept, 
"Love and you shall be loved: all love is as mathe- 
matically just as the two sides of an algebraic equa- 
tion," is a most unsentimental argument for loving 
much, but a most whiningly sentimental argument for 
demanding to be loved. The shilling may be dropped 
into a beggar's hat to afford the giver enjoyment of 
his own munificence, or to do penance for a previous 
sin of greed, or to avoid the self -accusation" of stingi- 
ness (all sentimental motives), or to express one's 
understanding sympathy for another life that thus 
becomes, if only for an instant and a shilling's worth, 
one's own. It is the same shilling in any case — but 
it does not mean the same thing. And of course 
fiction is bound to be concerned above all with what 
it means. 

At this point some close analyst of motive takes the 
floor to ask whether there is not, behind all these dis- 
tinctions, a fundamental sameness. Whatever we do, 
and whyever we do it, does not every motive originate 
in self, and does not every act proceed out of the in- 
dividual's instinct for self -fulfilment ■? One man de- 
spoils the poor to increase his own wealth: another 
gives out of what he has, ostensibly to help the poor : 



80 THE MODERN NOVEL 

but is not this merely a more refined and sensitive 
selfishness, the very quintessence in fact of self -grati- 
fication? To which we must return, for all answer: 
' ' Yes, we do indeed at every turn that which we have 
the most and the strongest reasons for wanting to do. 
There is no unselfishness in the sense of acts which 
profit us nothing, materially or morally. But that 
fact does not abolish the infinite gradations in the 
rewards of our conduct. It is precisely of those 
gradations that the novelist, if he be worthy, must 
take most account. All conduct does originate in 
self; but it does not all end there. Let the novelist 
look to it that he express his own will in conduct which 
takes the self outward into other lives ; which identi- 
fies the ego with other egos, and reaches across the 
barriers of selfhood to some sort of community. ' ' In 
short, there is a self that expresses itself in terms of 
self, with reference always inward; there is another 
self that has the outward reference, expressing itself 
by instinct and habit in terms of other things — and 
this second self is an entity much better worth ex- 
pressing. It is the non-sentimental ego. Let the 
novelist understand it, and be it, we say; else his 
appeal to us is of the shallowest. A. murders B. ; 
C. gives his life trying to save B. from A. . Call both 
acts self-fulfilment, as ultimately they are: all we 
need point out is that it makes a great deal of differ- 
ence what kind of self you have to fulfil, and that the 
novelist does well to choose discriminatingly which he 
shall hold up to our esteem. 



SENTIMENTALISM 81 

Or, to illustrate the same matter in historical 
terms : — 

Richardson was the sentimentalist incarnate. 
Fielding was the satirist. In Pamela Richardson por- 
trayed a somewhat prudish servant girl resisting the 
attempts of her libertine master to seduce her, and at 
last, by having the good sense to keep herself inac- 
cessible, winning his hand in marriage. Her conduct 
is right; her motive a rather low expediency — the 
virtue, not of brave and thoughtful idealism, but of 
convention added to fear. That the element of ex- 
pediency figures largely in her conduct is proved by 
her slavish adulation of Mr. B. when he offers her 
marriage. He has behaved monstrously to her, made 
himself loathsome to the sense of decency — and yet 
when his offers cease to be "illicit" Pamela can only 
cry out in melting gratitude at his angelic condescen- 
sion. One is reminded of John Tanner's sarcastic re- 
tort to Octavius: "So we are to marry your sister 
to a damned scoundrel by way of reforming her char- 
acter ! ' ' — both Octavius and Richardson being victims 
of the old sentimental confusion of "character" with 
"reputation." Pamela shares with them a tawdry 
superstition that it is vile for a coward and sneak to 
possess a noble woman in one way, but eminently 
praiseworthy and satisfactory for him to possess her 
in another. John Tanner and Fielding share the 
somewhat different notion that it is detestable for a 
coward and sneak to possess a noble woman at all, 
and that if she is really noble she will see him for 



82 THE MODERN NOVEL 

what he is, and despise him as much when he grovels 
before her as when he tries to dominate her by trick- 
ery or force. Fielding took Richardson's theme and 
turned it into ridicule by inversion. He portrayed a 
young serving-man who resists the advances of his 
wanton mistress — not in order to advocate laxity of 
conduct against Richardson's narrow rigidity, but to 
extinguish with burlesque a moralist who advocated 
the narrowest rigidity for the most dubious reasons. 
Both novelists would have Pamela guard herself well : 
but one of them would have her do it for reasons 
which prove her a sensible creature with a taint of 
canny self-righteousness, the other for reasons which 
prove her a noble woman of some capacity to think for 
herself. The really dramatic crux of living is not in 
conduct but in motive. 

Now, it is true that Fielding savours his own satire 
just as much as Richardson does his own sentimental- 
ism, and that both are equally far from philosophical 
disinterestedness. But one finds his delight in a 
philosophy which makes human nature out a pretty 
small and mean affair, even when it is doing right; 
the other, in a philosophy which shows human nature 
as having an infinite capacity for constructive good, 
even when it is doing wrong. Pamela is "Virtue 
Rewarded," with the insistence on the reward; Jo- 
seph Andrews is "Virtue Rewarded," with the in- 
sistence on the virtue. If the conventional code is to 
recommend itself to the most humane minds, it must 
do so on some such basis as Fielding's, not on egoistic, 
self-seeking, and sentimental grounds. Safety and 






SENTIMENTALISM 83 

profit are sentimental motives for behaving well : good 
behaviour finds its true level only in a defiant Tight- 
ness of the mind to which self-violation is the unbear- 
able wrong. 

This difference of motive — the difference, let us call 
it, between sentimentalism and fine taste — is, I repeat, 
all-important to the worker in fiction. He will have 
expressed, when all the words are written down and 
all the situations resolved, only himself: let him not 
think he can escape himself utterly, for all the words 
and all the situations will be of his choice, charged 
with the meanings which he alone has given them, in- 
dicative of his purposes and ideals. But let him ex- 
press himself in terms of other things, of ideals which 
touch more than his self-interest; let him be like the 
bank-note that changes hands only to reappear as its 
own worth of food or clothing or firewood, not like 
the coin in a miser's hoard, which can only draw to 
itself more and more other precisely similar coins, 
endless vain repetitions of itself, to be gloated over in 
moments of sterile ecstasy. 



Ill 



Of course I should not wish to be understood as 
trying to read Samuel Richardson, by bell and book, 
out of his importance to the history of the novel. 
If I undertook that, I should expect no better reward 
than laughter. The literature which makes up the 
whole body of a tradition and an art, and which is 



84 THE MODERN NOVEL 

therefore greater than individuals and their books, 
has never required that flawlessness which the most 
exactingly critical readers think it well to demand of 
their book before they will consent to be much inter- 
ested in it. No: literature has never been above 
teaching itself by poor beginnings, the half-suggestion 
of merit here, even the downright failure there ; and in 
the long run the worth of most things is found to 
survive, or at least to be rediscovered, in order that 
art may learn every important lesson that exists to 
be learned. Richardson is very far indeed from such 
feeble and half-profitless beginnings, matter merely 
for instruction to the form of the novel after his ac- 
tual substance has been found wanting and cast away. 
Indeed, he stands much nearer to the full success, the 
triumphant achievement of his own kind of greatness. 

That greatness lies, so far as a sentence will describe 
it, in his having done for the inner world of the heart 
what Defoe did for the outer world of material cir- 
cumstance: subjected it to the analysis of a minute 
and painstaking realism, anatomized it at once more 
truly and more vividly than any before him had done. 
Richardson is the first in the novel to prove that moral 
or mental history can be truly dramatic, and that any 
life, even the most commonplace, can be made, if only 
it is understood, to yield the reader finer thrills than 
had hitherto come from even the most exciting stories 
of event. 

There is a sense too in which Richardson is imper- 
sonal like the dramatist, and therefore escapes direct 
responsibility for the opinions which his characters 



SENTIMENTALISM 85 

hold and express; for his stories are told in letters 
exchanged by the characters participating in them, 
and no one questions that in the main the letters ex- 
press genuine and natural reactions of folk who are 
real, permanent, and very much themselves. But the 
novelist and the dramatist cannot escape indirect re- 
sponsibility: after all, they are undertaking to repre- 
sent life for us, and if their characters represent it 
only, or primarily, at and below a certain moral alti- 
tude, we shall properly say that their conception of 
life is insufficient. The artist chooses his puppets be- 
cause they are interesting to him; and we have the 
right to say, if we find it so, that he is relatively too 
much interested in the wrong ones, the ones who are 
beneath the best that we know. Richardson speaks in 
the long run through Pamela just as intelligibly as 
though she were empowered to speak directly for 
him ; and we hardly need the various prefaces and 
conclusions by the "Editor" to tell us that he was 
exactly the sentimentalist his choice and treatment 
of Pamela as a heroine would imply. It was a tre- 
mendous achievement, and an influential one, to have 
read the hearts of others, and those not of his sex, so 
minutely as Richardson did: nevertheless, we cannot 
acquit him of having sentimentally taken those hearts 
at more than their true relative worth, or of having 
sentimentally preached a dubious ethic — superior con- 
duct for inferior reasons. 

How certainly the novel can be trusted in the end 
to perpetuate its best and discard its worst is shown 
by an odd fact in the history of appreciation of Rich- 



86 THE MODERN NOVEL 

ardson. His reputation waxed and waned and waxed 
again, and has now, it seems to me as I gather the 
consensus of recent judgments, all but regained its 
old prestige — and that in spite of our unanimous 
hatred of his sentimentalism. First he was valued 
for this quality, then he was despised for it, and now 
he is valued in spite of it, and because of his sympa- 
thetic and minute analysis. Our least sentimental 
age has vindicated Richardson, one of the most senti- 
mental of novelists, thus proving abundantly that 
there is more in him than the sentimentalism, and 
that the composite intelligence of criticism over any 
great stretch of time has a sure and single eye for 
merit, with whatever defects that merit is accompa- 
nied. 

But it was the sentimentalism that came uppermost 
at the beginning; and if the author of Clarissa had a 
beneficial effect on the novel as an instrument of con- 
stantly increasing scope, I do not see how we can 
blink the fact that he had a disastrous effect on it as 
a revelation and criticism of the true values of life. 
I cannot give up my distrust of sentimentalism merely 
because Richardson, the chief of sentimentalists, hap- 
pened also to be an incomparable anatomist of motive 
and feeling; and I see him as one of the chief im- 
pulses in the debilitating 18th century cult of " sensi- 
bility.' ' 

As we have noted before, half of the aesthetic his- 
tory of the two generations after Richardson is im- 
plied in the word "Gothic" and the changes its mean- 
ing underwent. The other half is contained in this 



SENTIMENTALISM 87 

other word " sensibility,' ' which points to whatever in 
emotion is overwrought, hyperaesthetic, neurasthenic, 
and at the same time super-refined and faddling. 
The School of Terror is simply Gothicism plus sensi- 
bility ; and Richardson, a realist of the realists, is thus, 
through his emotionalism, a powerful impulse toward 
one of the most extravagant romantic traditions ever 
evolved. The cult of sensibility means always the 
maximum of feeling for the minimum of cause; and 
when we see the Terrorists displaying the last ex- 
tremities of feeling for no cause that we can do better 
than laugh at, we see them reaping the natural harvest 
of Richardson the -specialist in self-pity and tears. 
He set a whole age weeping, not for sorrow, not even 
for romantic Weltschmerz, but for simple enjoyment 
of its own shallow and rather maudlin wretchedness. 
It was an age comparable in this respect to the board- 
ing-school miss who feels herself cheated* and taken 
advantage of if she is not made to cry at the matinee. 
She goes in order to cry ; and the latter 18th century 
sometimes strikes us as having existed primarily in 
order to feel, over anything or nothing, the extremes 
of emotion. 

Not since that time, happily, have we seen senti- 
mentalism in anything like the same repute. The 
prolonged battle between the man of feeling and the 
man of reflection seems at last on the verge of decision 
in favour of the man of reflection. One of the great- 
est of living novelists, himself anything but a disciple 
of Richardson and sensibility, alludes quite naturally 
to "the unofficial sentimentalism, which, like the poor, 



88 THE MODERN NOVEL 

is exceedingly difficult to get rid of . " 1 A century ago 
he would have had to call sentimentalism official in- 
stead of unofficial. It has never died: it has simply 
receded farther and farther into the underworld of 
the unsanctioned in art. From time to time it puts 
forth powerful reminders of its hold on the popular 
imagination: Uncle Tom's Cabin is on,e of those re- 
minders, All Sorts and Conditions of Men another. 
Mrs. Stowe and Sir Walter Besant, in other stories 
the most guileless and innocuous of sentimentalists, 
attain in these two books the special prestige of suc- 
cessful reformers. But elsewhere we see the sentimen- 
tal religion disintegrate into a dozen specialized and 
disunited rituals — let them be illustrated by the ju- 
venile fiction of "Oliver Optic" and the not so con- 
sciously juvenile formulae of E.-P.-Roe-ism. In gen- 
eral, it may be said that the sentimental novel had 
pretty well given up its claim to official status when it 
went into paper covers about the year 1875 ; and there 
it was contentedly to stay until Mrs. Florence Barclay 
and Mrs. Alice Hegan Rice and half a dozen other 
purveyors of blessedness, mostly feminine, brought it 
back for a moment to the factitious dignity of cloth. 



IV 



The official death of sentimentalism is of course 
very different from its extermination — which is even 

i Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus." By Joseph 
Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1914. *P. xii. 



SENTIMENTALISM 89 

now only a possibility. If one had to fix a date for its 
official death, I suppose that date might well be 1814, 
the year of Waverley. But the edict of execution had 
been already signed, in the work of an inconspicuous 
young woman of twenty-three — the most precocious 
genius in our fiction, for she had written at twenty- 
one a novel all but perfect in both the form and the 
substance of its contribution to the human comedy. 
In 1798, the year of the Lyrical Poems and Ballads 
and a great milestone in romanticism, Jane Austen 
was writing her third novel, Northanger Abbey, in 
which she took the spurious romanticism of the School 
of Terror and made it ridiculous. For her sunny com- 
mon sense, perhaps neither public nor publisher was 
ready: at all events Northanger Abbey lay neglected 
for twenty years, wasting its diffusion of light on the 
proverbial bottom drawer, like priceless radium in the 
heart of the earth waiting to be discovered. Writ- 
ten sixteen years before the publication of Waverley, 
it appeared four years after, and two after Jane Aus- 
ten's death — the first of her stories to bear her name 
on its title-page. 

In all six of those stories Miss Austen made merry 
with sentimentalism ; witness the title Sense and Sen- 
sibility (i.e., Sense versus Sensibility). But no- 
where is her kindly and indulgent ridicule more tell- 
ing than in an early episode of Northanger Abbey. 
The heroine, a girl potentially sensible but saturated 
with romances of the School of Radcliffe, goes in a 
properly sentimental mood to visit friends at North- 
anger Abbey. She is eager in her anticipation of the 



90 THE MODERN NOVEL 

ghostly, the grisly ; her visit will be a complete fiasco 
unless she is treated to at least an apparition or two. 
Everything goes promisingly. She is shown on the 
first night to a room in a wing of the Abbey; her 
imagination makes it baronially large, gloomy; the 
wind howling at the casements and down the chimney 
does what it can to make up for the footsteps of the 
ancient servitor which should reverberate down the 
long corridor ; and — yes, actually there is the one in- 
dispensable appurtenance of such situations, a dark 
and formidable cabinet of immemorial age. It is 
there, of course, that she is to find the time-yellowed 
manuscript which is to unlock some horrifying secret 
of the past. And, tucked away in a recess, is indeed 
the roll of papers. She seizes it with tremors of ex- 
pectancy; in another instant she will have begun to 
unravel the secret. Then, a clumsy attempt to snuff 
her candle puts it out and leaves her in utter dark- 
ness. Better and better! She lies shivering in the 
great bed, a prey to nameless delicious terrors until 
sleep comes. With the morning light that awakens 
her, she is up to consummate her discovery. Let Jane 
Austen tell it: — 

' l Her greedy eye glanced rapidly over a page. She 
started at its import. Could it be possible, or did 
not her senses play her false? An inventory of 
linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all 
that was before her ! If the evidence of sight might 
be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand. She 
seized another sheet, and saw the same articles with 
little variation; a third, a fourth, and a fifth pre- 



SENTIMENTALISM 91 

sented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats, and 
waistcoats faced her in each. Two others, penned by 
the same hand, marked an expenditure scarcely more 
interesting, in letters, hair-powder, shoe-string, and 
breeches-ball. And the larger sheet, which had en- 
closed the rest, seemed by its first cramp line, 'To 
poultice chestnut mare/ a farrier's bill! Such was 
the collection of papers (left, perhaps, as she could 
then suppose, by the negligence of a servant in the 
place whence she had taken them), which had filled 
her with expectation and alarm, and robbed her of 
half her night's rest! She felt humbled to the dust. 
Could not the adventure of the chest have taught her 
wisdom ? A corner of it catching her eye as she lay, 
seemed to rise up in judgment against her. Nothing 
could now be clearer than the absurdity of her recent 
fancies. To suppose that a manuscript of many gen- 
erations back could have remained undiscovered in a 
room such as that, so modern, so habitable! or that 
she should be the first to possess the skill of unlock- 
ing a cabinet, the key of which was open to all ! " x 

No example could show more clearly the war be- 
tween sensibility and the sense of humour. Comedy 
is in fact the chief weapon against sentimentalism, 
and the one against which sentimentalism is least 
likely to prevail. There is more than accidental fit- 
ness in this simple fact: that Richardson, the most 
sentimental of all the great English writers of fiction, 
is the only one of them who is not a humourist. 
Name them over: Defoe, a master of both rough 

i Northanger Abbey, Chapter XXII. 



92 THE MODERN NOV EL 

farce and droll characterization ; Fielding and Thack- 
eray, master ironists; Dickens, a supreme creator of 
comic individuals — a master capable indeed of maud- 
lin sentimentality, but only in moments of conspicu- 
ous lapse; Scott, George Eliot, and Hardy, masters 
of regional humour, the deep unconscious drollery of 
peasant folk; Smollett, a dealer in coarse rough rol- 
licking fun; Meredith, who looked on the face of the 
Truly Comic Muse, seen of few men ; — all belong in 
the list, except Richardson the lugubrious. Senti- 
mentalism cannot stand in the presence of "clean 
mirth." 

Neither, if we are to judge by Sterne, can it stand 
in the presence of mirth sometimes unclean. For the 
invariable process of Sterne, as I understand it, is 
to take the materials of sensibility and turn them, 
by a subtle infusion of burlesque, into infectious and 
sometimes obscene drollery. The very familiar epi- 
sode of Uncle Toby and the fly is sometimes seriously 
quoted as a piece of sensibility expressive of the age 
and identifying Sterne with the Richardsonian cult 
in its reduction to absurdity. But surely with 
Sterne it was a conscious reduction to absurdity : 
surely, in this very passage, he deliberately bur- 
lesques, making sensibility poke fun at itself: — 

"My uncle Tooy was a man patient of injuries; — 
not from want of courage, — I have told you in a 
former chapter, 'that he was a man of courage': — 
And will add here, that where just occasion presented, 
or called it forth, — I know no man under whose arm 
I would have sooner taken shelter ; — nor did this arise 






SENTIMENTALISM 93 

from any insensibility or obtuseness of his intellec- 
tual parts; — for he felt this insult of my father's 
as feelingly as a man could do; — but he was of a 
peaceful, placid nature, — no jarring element in it, — 
all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle 
Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly. 

" — Go — says he, one day at dinner, to an over- 
grown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tor- 
mented him cruelly all dinner-time, — and which after 
infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by 
him; — I'll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising 
from his chair, and going across the room, with the 
fly in his hand, — I'll not hurt a hair of thy head: — 
Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand 
as he spoke, to let it escape ; — go, poor devil, get thee 
gone, why should I hurt thee ? — This world surely is 
wide enough to hold both thee and me. 

1 ' I was but ten years old when this happened : but 
whether it was, that the action itself was more in 
unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which in- 
stantly set my whole frame into one vibration of 
most pleasurable sensation; — or how far the manner 
and expression of it might go towards it ; — or in what 
degree, or by what secret magick, — a tone of voice 
and harmony of movement, attuned by mercy, might 
find a passage to my heart, I know not ; — this I know, 
that the lesson of universal good-will then taught and 
imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been 
worn out of my mind: And tho' I would not de- 
preciate what the study of the Literce humaniores, at 
the university, have done for me in that respect, or 



94 THE MODEB N NOVEL 

discredit the other helps of an expensive education 
bestowed upon me, both at home and abroad since; 
—yet I often think that I owe one half of my philan- 
thropy to that one accidental impression. 

"251^ This is to serve for parents and governors 
instead of a whole volume upon the subject." 1 

Here, as throughout Tristram Shandy and, for that 
matter, A Sentimental Journey, one sees the spirit of 
comedy as the great infallible corrective of hysteria, 
the dismally emotional side of that sentimentalism 
which takes itself so seriously. It needs but to be 
taken with a grain of mirth, to dissolve away into the 
empty pretentiousness it is. 



These few sketchy data will serve well enough to 
show what sentimentalism is, and how its arch-enemy 
the spirit of laughter puts it out of countenance. 
Sentimentalism is a solemn spirit, and flourishes only 
in places not reached by the light of mirth. So much 
at least is clear if we speak in terms of the sharpest 
contrast available: that between the obvious 18th 
century sentimentalism of extreme sensibility and 
the equally obvious forms of comedy which under- 
took to destroy it. The sensibility is as abnormal and 
perverted as the laughter is hearty, genuine, side- 
splitting, or gross. One is like the odor of musk, the 
other like the sound of a drinking song. 

i The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Book II, Chap- 
ter XII. 



SENTIMENTALISM 95 

But there remain the more subtle and complicated 
manifestations of sentimentalism : and for these, only 
a more subtle weapon of Comedy will serve. Because 
it fell to Meredith to create in English that subtler in- 
strument and its first triumphant applications in story, 
and because he made the first nice and permanent defi- 
nition of such Comedy, our doctrine here can best be 
reproduced from his Essay on the Idea of Comedy and 
of the Uses of the Comic Spirit. 

Comedy means to Meredith the "laughter of the 
mind." "The laughter of Comedy is impersonal and 
unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile [i. e., than Satire, 
which is "a blow in the back or the face"] ; often no 
more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for 
the mind directs it ; and it might be called the humour 
of the mind." Meredith draws his distinctions with 
the greatest possible nicety among Satire, Irony, Hu- 
mour, and Comedy — overlapping elements, of course, 
but differently centred. And of Comedy he makes 
two most important generalizations : — 

First, it is inherently and essentially social. "The 
Comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square, 
of the society he depicts; and he addresses the still 
narrower enclosure of men's intellects, with reference 
to the operation of the social world upon their char- 
acters. He is not concerned with beginnings or end- 
ings or surroundings, but with what you are now 
weaving. To understand his work and value it, you 
must have a sober liking of your own kind and a sober 
estimate of our civilized qualities." One remembers 
at this point that the self -righteousness, the vanity, the 



96 THE MODERN NOVEL 

hypocrisy, and the frivolous optimism which I named 
as belonging in the calendar of sentimentalism, are 
all intensely egoistic or anti-social failings. Thus this 
Comedy of Meredith is just the heaven-inspired 
scourge for them. 

Second, since Comedy is a social implement, it is 
practicable only in some approximation of a real so- 
ciety. Only the rougher tools of irony and satire 
will do where a society is struggling into existence, 
or going through the period of muddle. " There are 
plain reasons why the Comic poet is not a frequent 
apparition; and why the great Comic poet remains 
without a fellow. A society of cultivated men and 
women is required, wherein ideas are current and the 
perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with mat- 
ter and an audience. The semi-barbarism of merely 
giddy communities, and feverish emotional periods, 
repel him ; and also a state of marked social inequality 
of the sexes; nor can he whose business is to address 
the mind be understood where there is not a moderate 
degree of intellectual activity." 

This second prerequisite of true Comedy, a real so- 
ciety, explains several traits in the Meredith who form- 
ulates it. It explains, first, his tendency toward femi- 
nism, his faith in the illimitable capacity of woman to 
take her place as equal of the greatest — a belief which 
he constantly enforces in his novels by showing the 
triumph of noble womanhood over what is weakest, 
most sentimental in man. "Where the veil is thrown 
over women's faces, you cannot have society, without 
which the senses are barbarous and the Comic spirit is 



SENTIMENTALISM 97 

driven to the gutters of grossness to slake its thirst" 
— as, for example, in our excellent and indispensable 
18th century. It is for " cultivated women to recog- 
nize that the Comic Muse is one of their best friends. 
They are blind to their interests in swelling the ranks 
of the sentimentalists. " 

Also, does not this same prerequisite of an urbane 
and matured society explain the smallness of Mere- 
dith's public, and the more and more specialized nar- 
rowness of the scenes in which he elected to work? 
It is pretty clear from his general doctrine that he 
had visions of a time, perhaps remote, when comedy 
should have become a national institution, as accessible 
and as democratic as any form of national art has ever 
been; a time when the reciprocity of comic poet and 
audience should become all that the most sanguine 
imagination could conceive, using Aristophanes, Con- 
greve, Moliere, and their several publics as points of 
departure. AVe misconceive Meredith entirely if we 
doubt that in such a state of reciprocity he would 
have been most at home, ideally self-fulfilled. His 
idea of creativeness was not to be eccentric, mannered, 
aristocratic : it was to work in a democratic tradition, 
a school, and what he most laments is the unreadiness 
of the existing public for a democratic tradition that 
should be at the same time fine, stimulating, and brac- 
ing as well as democratic. As it was, the conditions 
gave him neither the society for audience nor the so- 
ciety for subject. He believed sufficiently in his vi- 
sion to write for the few readers who had something of 
his own comic intuition — not because he prized his 



98 THE MODERN NOVEL 

own rarity, but because he wanted to help leaven the 
whole mass. He wrote about the few small social 
groups which met his definition of real intercourse, not 
because he wanted to idealize an aristocracy, but 
because he wanted to democratize an ideal. Presently 
he realized, at first with dismay, the smallness of his 
public. It was then that his style became so special- 
ized : only a few could follow him, but those few could 
follow him anywhere, and he saw it as his peculiar 
office to do the most that he could for them. Better 
the success of perfect intimacy with a few than the 
flat failure to win the many — as he could only have 
done by setting the clock of social evolution far 
ahead, farther than any one man can, even a major 
prophet. If Meredith had not chosen the fullest pos- 
sible possession of his own public, he would probably 
have fallen between two publics, missing both. His 
actual choice is what he tacitly expresses to us as we 
see him moving most often in the restricted area of a 
single ancient house, a single aristocratic family and 
its connections, choosing a background so remote and 
personse so specially bred that our own democratic 
experience may fail to furnish their counterparts. 

These points are worth jotting here, against the 
popular conception of Meredith as one who framed a 
cult of exclusiveness for an aesthetic inner circle. He 
believes in Comedy as democratizer and sweetener of 
civilization ; but finding no audience and, on the nec- 
essary democratic scale, no subject, he turns where he 
can. This resignation he saw as his personal part, 
the only one possible to him, toward the fulfilment of 



SENTIMENTALISM 99 

his ideal in the future. He is never more truly him- 
self, more Meredithian, than when he says : "I think 
that all right use of life, and the one secret of life, is 
to pave ways for the firmer footing of those who suc- 
ceed us; as to my works, I know them faulty, think 
them of worth only when they point and aid to that 
end." 1 

1T0 G. P. Baker. Pp. 398-99, Vol. 29, Works of George 
Meredith, Memorial Edition. New York: Charles Scribner's 
Sons. 1909-12. 



IV 



DIDACTICISM 



In nearly everything said thus far about the nature 
of fiction and of the criteria by which we should judge 
it, it is assumed that all great and good fiction has a 
purpose, and that that purpose is the impersonal and 
disinterested expression of imaginative insight into 
human nature and life. It appeared, or seemed to, 
that romance and realism are simply different ways of 
getting at this central thing, and that the differences 
between them are of means rather than of meaning, of 
process rather than of purpose. From the perception 
of this relation, we fell to considering one of the prin- 
cipal obstacles to the impersonal and disinterested 
expression of truth : the feeling which we call ' ' senti- 
mentalism," an egotistical and interested spirit that 
will not have truth on truth's own arduous and aus- 
tere terms, but is always pampering itself with 
thought of the rewards of truth, or of the superiority 
conferred by the possession of truth, or of the obnox- 
iousness of truth which it happens to dislike. Against 
this enemy of unselfish truth there is, we saw, one 
spirit which is sure to prevail: the spirit of Chaucer 
and Kabelais, of Shakspere and Moliere, of Jane Aus- 
ten, of Fielding, of Meredith — the sweetening and 
chastening influence of Comedy. 

We come now to a second and on the whole less 
formidable enemy of disinterested truth. We as a 

103 



104 THE MODERN NOVEL 

generation of readers have come to the conclusion that 
the novel at its best cannot be primarily a display of 
the author's personal emotions, the reactions of his 
own sensibility; and we have as certainly come to the 
conclusion that neither can it be primarily a display 
of his private opinions, his ethical sense striking atti- 
tudes in the presence of his subject-matter. In short, 
there has grown up among us a feeling amounting to 
conviction, and nearly always assumed by critics as a 
truism, that the novelist must not preach to us. Be- 
tween the spirit that sentimentalizes and the spirit 
that preaches, there may be and often is a kinship. 
Some examples already named in speaking of senti- 
mentalism — Uncle Tom's Cabin, All Sorts and Condi- 
tions of Men, the juvenile fiction of "Oliver Optic" — 
are not only sentimental fiction, they are sentimental 
pulpiteering. They might equally well have been 
saved for illustration of this second enemy of sound 
worth in fiction: the pulpiteering spirit, or didacti- 
cism. 

Our temperamental objection to this particular 
breach of artistic discipline seems to us deeply 
grounded, and so much a part of the nature of artistic 
strategy that we are prone to assume our Tightness 
without argument or investigation. We readily take 
for granted, unless we have some reading, that the pre- 
ceptorial tone could never have been a very reputable 
element in fiction, or have seemed palatable to any 
great fraction of even the most naive generation of 
readers. But does this assumption tally with the fact ? 
Euphues and His England, which set a record of 






DIDACTICISM 105 

progress in fiction for its own day, is practically a 
manual of polite usage, a discussion of social and 
moral codes; the ethical strain is one of the most 
prominent elements of Sidney's Arcadia (his Pamela, 
by the way, gives all of her name but its accent to 
Richardson's Pamela) ; and, as everybody knows, 
Richardson conceived Pamela in the process of creat- 
ing a sort of manual of letter-writing, a book of mod- 
els of polite sentimental correspondence for the un- 
tutored. From Lyly to the early 19th century 
in England, and from the middle 17th century 
to the middle 19th in America, the moral story, or 
novel written as practical advice and guide to con- 
duct, was exceedingly popular. It is still not a rare 
genre in Sunday School libraries. The Aretina of 
Sir George Mackenzie, that most exquisite example of 
the effete " heroic romance," was written on this 
theory, quoted with intense relish by Sir Walter Ra- 
leigh in his admirable little book The English Novel: 
"Albeit Essays be the choicest pearls in the jewel 
house of Moral Philosophy, yet I ever thought that 
they were set off to the best advantage, and appeared 
with the greatest lustre, when they were laced upon a 
Romance." And the youthful essayist follows his 
own prescription by interspersing his tale with Eu- 
phuistic moralizing essays. Note how matter-of- 
course is his assumption, the very opposite of ours, 
that the only tenable purpose of fiction, its one pre- 
sentable self-justification, is its service as engine of 
"Moral Philosophy." 

There were many decades when all the licentious- 



106 THE MODERN NOVEL 

ness in fiction masqueraded as moral instruction by 
horrible example. The novel could allow itself the 
most excessive licence in portrayal of vice and scandal, 
so long as it included the sanctimonious rebuke of evil- 
doing. The work of Aphra Behn, Mrs. Eliza Hay- 
wood, and the once notorious Mrs. Mary de la Riviere 
Manley survived, at least for a time, the disapproval of 
good taste largely by virtue of its factitious and hypo- 
critical acceptance of the popular moral judgment. 
It is sometimes hard for us to remember that the novel 
as we like it to be has had only a little more than a 
generation of unchallenged respectability; indeed 
there are those still living who count it an insidious 
agency of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Before 
that very recent attainment of repute, the novel was 
prone to purchase any cheapest sanction, if only 
that it might succeed in the struggle to survive at all ; 
and no sanction could be more inexpensive, or more 
certain to undermine objection on moral grounds, than 
that of the commonly received theology, the popular 
ethics. The novelist circumvents the hostility of the 
pulpit by making his novel a sermon. 

The existence of the former prejudice, and the 
anxiety of even the most innocent teller of tales to 
protect himself from the suspicion of having taught 
no moral lesson, may be illustrated by the Preface of 
Alonzo and Melissa: or The Unfeeling Father, an 
"American tale" signed "Daniel Jackson, Jr.," and 
published at Exeter in 1831. I quote the whole Pref- 
ace : if its general quaintness fail to please, none can 
resist one long and strangely inconclusive sentence 



DIDACTICISM 107 

i 

which suggests that even in 1831 the incorrigible type- 
setter was a sore trial to helpless authorship. — 

' ' Whether the story of Alonzo and Melissa will gen- 
erally please, the writer knows not ; if, however, he is 
not mistaken, it is not unfriendly to religion and vir- 
tue. — One thing was aimed to be shown, that a firm 
reliance on Providence, however the affections might 
be at war with its dispensations, is the only source of 
consolation in the gloomy hours of affliction ; and that 
generally such dependence, though crossed by difficul- 
ties and perplexities, will be crowned with victory at 
last. 

1 l It is also believed that the story contains no inde- 
corous stimulants ; nor is it filled with unmeaning and 
inexplicated incidents sounding upon the sense, but 
imperceptible to the understanding. When anxie- 
ties have been excited by involved and doubtful 
events, they are afterwards elucidated by the conse- 
quences. 

"The writer believes that generally he has copied 
nature. In the ardent prospects raised in youthful 
bosoms, the almost consummation of their wishes, their 
sudden and unexpected disappointment, the sorrows 
of separation, the joyous and unlooked for meeting — 
in the poignant feelings of Alonzo, when at the grave 
of Melissa, he poured the feelings of his anguished 
soul over her niniature [sic] by the 'moon's pale ray;' 
— when Melissa, sinking on her knees before her fa- 
ther, was received to his bosom as a beloved daughter 
risen from the dead. 

"If these scenes are not imperfectly drawn, they 



108 THE MODERN NOVEL 

will not fail to interest the refined sensibilities of the 
reader. ' ' 

Nor was it only in the "unofficial sentimentalism, ? ' 
the outlaw fiction of the underworld of letters, that 
the moral purport of art became a very momentous and 
pressing problem. Dr. Johnson, of whose official 
status there could certainly be no question, worried 
himself, in what seems to us a most naive and archaic 
way, over the morality of Shakspere. Shakspere, says 
Johnson in the introduction to his edition of the plays, 
"sacrifices virtue to convenience," and is "more care- 
ful to please than to instruct." Not only does he 
make "no just distribution of good or evil," but he is 
not "always careful to show in the virtuous a disap- 
probation of the wicked." It is quite clear that Dr. 
Johnson would have considered Othello a more moral 
play if Othello had been made to upbraid Iago in 
sanctimonious platitudes. When Johnson says that 
Shakspere "carries his persons indifferently through 
right and wrong" — that is, tells the truth of life — 
"and, at the close, dismisses them without further 
care, and leaves their example to operate by chance," 
he utters what is from the modern angle the ultimate 
praise of Shakspere 's objectivity, but what is, from 
his entirely typical 18th century point of view, the 
gravest censure of a defect which "the barbarity of 
the age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer's 
duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue 
independent on time and place." 

From such representative data it clearly transpires, 
and is indeed the fact, that throughout most of the 



D I D A C T I C I SM 109 



history of modern fiction the novelist's relation to the 
preacher has been a most real problem, with the ten- 
dency all for valuing the story-teller in proportion as 
he is homilist and sermonizer. Judged as a mere mat- 
ter of a3Sthetic taste, our modern predilection may be 
simply another of the shifting fashions of art, a swing 
of the pendulum. By the mere counting of heads, 
) either among novelists since Defoe or among their 
readers, we should undoubtedly find our objection to 
didacticism overruled ; and indeed there is nothing in 
actual history to tell us that we are right, or that the 
great novelists of the future may not transmit their 
meaning or message to us in a gospel of practical con- 
duct, with the strongest emphasis on what we ought to 
do and why we ought to do it. 



II 



On the other hand, there is nothing to confine us to 
the purely historical counting of heads. 

Perhaps this is as fitting a context as any for the 
declaration of a personal faith that the novel as a form 
and as a possibility, regardless of any individual nov- 
elist and his achievement, is always becoming better. 
It is always learning from itself, its successes and its 
failures ; it is always learning something too, in a less 
important way, from its critics formal and informal ; 
and as a person is said to "better his condition" by 
marrying above his class, so the novel is always better- 
ing its condition by marriage with new and important 



110 THE MODERN NOVEL 

ideas. We may have no Dickens, no individual crea- 
tive genius of the first order, but if we did have one 
he would write better novels than Dickens wrote. It 
is possible to-day for a very inferior novelist to com- 
pose novels better than those of Dickens in every way 
that acquired knowledge and intelligent workmanship 
control; indeed it would be difficult for him not to 
write novels better in such ways than Dickens's. 
There is an elemental gift of creativeness, and it is 
more important than anything else; but this is not 
to say that nothing else is important — and that ele- 
mental gift may be hampered and curtailed by tempo- 
rary conditions of various sorts. The number of such 
impeding conditions grows, I think, constantly less as 
the novel learns its lessons of form and taste ; genius, 
supposing it tp occur, has more and more certainty of 
getting itself fulfilled. 

So the lesson of history is not just that what has 
happened may happen again. The very fact that a 
thing has happened in an organic evolution, like that 
of a form of art, is almost the strongest guarantee 
against its happening again; or, if it happen again, 
against its regaining the elder prestige. How pallid, 
spurious, and altogether inadequate seems, for ex- 
ample, after even this brief time, the fin de siecle at- 
tempt by Stevenson and his popular imitators to re- 
vive the costume romance of Scott! And if we find 
history giving a sort of sanction to didactic elements 
in the novel, such elements as our intuition abhors, we 
need only reflect that perhaps the change was a real 
growth ; in a word, that our intuition is fundamentally 



DIDACTICISM 111 

right, and that the history of fiction in prose is only a 
series of gropings toward an ideal which is at last 
found, or approximated. Especially shall we be safe 
in deploring the didactic fashion if we find our pres- 
ent bias supported by a variety of considerations more 
fundamental than even the majority vote of history — 
considerations in reason, in logic, in the whole ration- 
ale of taste. 

When we approach the question non-historically, 
we find a decisive argument against the didactic em- 
ployment of fiction in one simple fact, still too often 
overlooked : the fact that the novelist creates his evi- 
dence, his characters and scenes and situations, his 
story, and that they are infinitely more his than his 
opinions are. Nothing about life can be proved by 
imagined evidence, simply because anything about 
life can be proved by it. It is a truism of logic that 
nothing can be proved by an analogy, because an 
analogy can be found in fact that seems to prove any 
proposition. How much more, then, is the principle 
true of fiction, which is free to manufacture even its 
analogy. You can write a story to prove that slavery 
is an inhuman institution or that it is a humane insti- 
tution; you 1 can write a novel against monogamy, 
and another one equally persuasive against polygamy 
or polyandry or free love. Didactic novels are always 
concerned to prove something: that one course of 
conduct is right and the alternative course wrong, that 
one vice is less vicious than another or one virtue more 
virtuous than another, that some particular thing 
ought to be done or not done, that this or that problem 



112 THE MODERN NOVEL 

should be solved thus and so, and no otherwise. But 
the didactic novel is always a self-destroying victim 
to this betraying fact: that it was created expressly 
to prove its chosen didactic point, and, being so 
created, can prove nothing except the existence of 
its own purpose — that is, its author's private view of 
something. You cannot get behind or around this 
fact. It is one of the few non-debatable things — not 
because, like a matter of taste, it admits of differences 
outside reason, but because, being purely a matter 
of reason, it admits of no differences at all. The 
didactic novelist 's imagined evidence is at most simply 
one vote for one opinion ; and on a point open to con- 
troversy no opinion is worth anything unless it results 
from all the votes for that opinion balanced against 
all the votes for all the other possible opinions. 

Even if we were to take the novelist's evidence as 
unquestioned actual fact instead of fancy, it would 
fail, then, to do more than illustrate an opinion by a 
more or less apt analogue. Of the difficulty of can- 
celling out all the factors in any given human prob- 
lem of justice so as to get an ultimate and valid solu- 
tion, John Stuart Mill has this to say: 

"To take another example from a subject already 
once referred to. In a co-operative industrial associa- 
tion, is it just or not that talent or skill should give a 
title to superior remuneration? On the negative side 
of the question it is argued, that whoever does the best 
he can deserves equally well, and ought not in justice 
to be put in a position of inferiority for no fault of 
his own; that superior abilities have already advan- 



;. 



DIDACTICISM 113 

tages more than enough, in the admiration they excite, 
the personal influence they command, and the internal 
sources of satisfaction attending them, without adding 
to these a superior share of the world's goods; and 
that society is bound in justice rather to make com- 
pensation to the less favoured, for this unmerited in- 
equality of advantages, than to aggravate it. On the 
contrary side it is contended, that society receives more 
from the more efficient labourer ; that, his services be- 
ing more useful, society owes him a larger return for 
them ; that a greater share of the joint result is actu- 
ally his work, and not to allow his claim to it is a kind 
of robbery; that, if he is only to receive as much as 
others, he can only be justly required to produce as 
much, and to give a smaller amount of time and exer- 
tion, proportioned to his superior efficiency. Who 
shall decide between these appeals to conflicting prin- 
ciples of justice? Justice has in this case two sides 
to it, which it is impossible to bring into harmony; 
and the two disputants have chosen opposite sides : 
the one looks to what it is just that the individual 
should receive ; the other, to what it is just that the 
community should give. Each, from his own point of 
view, is unanswerable; and any choice between them, 
on grounds of justice, must be perfectly arbitrary. 
Social utility alone can decide the preference." x 

When, in ordinary practical living, the sum of wis- 
dom can go no farther than to find what it seems best 

iFrom the Essay on Liberty. Utilitarianism, Liberty, and 
Representative Government. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 
(Everyman's Library.) 



114 THE MODERN NOVEL 

to do in the present given conditions, how presump- 
tuous and how hollow it is for the novelist to pretend 
that he has found a law which is universally true, a 
precept which will lead no one into error ! How vain 
and, in the last analysis, how silly to expect a fabri- 
cation of the inventive faculty to do for all mankind 
that which the best conscience of the individual man 
can hardly achieve for that one person, when he has all 
the terms of his problem spread out tangibly and 
visibly before him ! Looked at in this light, the novel 
which undertakes to tell us how to live — whom to 
marry, how to spend our money, how to choose our 
occupation, what God to believe in — seems at best a 
poor and shabby pretence, a well-meant insult to the 
intelligence, as the greater part of human advice in 
general proverbially is. 



Ill 



No: it is not the novelist's province to recommend 
special points or types of conduct to us, or to instruct 
us how to take sides in great partisan issues. It is 
his business to show us what things are and how they 
work, when looked at in the light of a humanely 
searching comprehension. The great issues that he 
tests, he tests in terms of action ; for actions, with their 
results, are his crucible for ideas. He may indeed 
treat certain ideals and notions of obligation in con- 
duct: but only as things that exist, as the forces be- 
hind character and action, as things that have, for 



DIDACTICISM 115 

his chosen characters in their given set of conditions, 
certain results. He is not a special pleader for any- 
thing. 

In these days when novels, as men, are popularly 
measured by their loyalties and their rancours, most 
novels written about the international situation take 
sides heatedly. They are interested in scientific or- 
ganization when that scientific organization is German, 
or in heroism when that heroism is French, in the 
struggle for national solidarity when that struggle is 
British or American ; and especially they are interested 
in the moral culpability of the enemy. The novelist 
is not to be despised as a man when he takes sides in 
such great issues; indeed, we as men should have to 
despise him if he did not. But as a novelist he has 
in the long run more to lose by confining himself to 
one side of a sharp issue than he can possibly gain by 
it. He may be doing the only thing possible to him in 
the circumstances ; but that only proves that the con- 
science of life is sometimes a more instant and over- 
mastering thing than the conscience of art, which is 
patient, far-seeing, and more willing to wait for certi- 
fied truth than to act on even a noble impulse. The 
best novels about the great war have been written 
about its effects on typical individuals or communi- 
ties, by writers who seem to be saying: "Here is 
what war is and does in the lives of a certain few per- 
sons chosen because they are like thousands of others, 
only perhaps more interesting. ' ' And we know that 
the great war novels of the future must be about war 
itself, its heroism and cowardice, its justices and in- 



116 THE MODERN NOVEL 

justices, its splendour and its horror. Those great 
novels will deal with things which are seen of all men 
as humanly important, wherever and by whomever 
exhibited, as truly after as before all the present prob- 
lems are solved and superseded. The only spirit 
which has any chauce of making itself felt in enduring 
art is that open-minded spirit revealed by an Ameri- 
can man of letters, himself one of the most valiant 
fighters in our Civil War, when, long years after the 
struggle which had both given and cost him so much, 
he wrote : 

"I know what uniform I wore — 

0, that I knew which side I fought for!" * 

When we take this austere view of the artist's de- 
tachment from the press of immediate practical is- 
sues, on whatever scale propounded, we see not only 
that it is impossible for his manufactured evidence to 
prove the rightness of this or that course of conduct, 
but that if it were possible it would still be undesir- 
able. He has a greater thing to do ; and his only hope 
of being practically useful in the long run lies in his 
doing it without fear or favour — especially without 
fear of the consequences if he renounce the popular ex- 
pediency of the passing moment, and without favour 
of one character against another because of either 's 
theories of conduct. 

Some famous words of Matthew Arnold serve to re- 
mind us of what disaster to truth follows the writer 's 

i The Hesitating Veteran in Shapes of Clay By Ambrose 
Bierce. New York and Washington : The Neale Publishing Co. 
X910, 



DIDACTICISM 117 

dedication of himself to a partisan bias, or to any one 
of the various self-interests of creed and class. Those 
words were written, to be sure, to preach a high ideal 
of criticism; but if they apply to criticism, in one 
sense a secondary and derived art, how much more 
emphatically must they apply to literature of the 
primary and creative orders, in terms of which criti- 
cism exists ! — 

"It is of the last importance that English criticism 
should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order 
to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to 
produce fruit to the future, it ought to take. The 
rule may be summed up in one word, — disinterested- 
ness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness ? 
By keeping aloof from practice : by resolutely follow- 
ing the law of its own nature, which is to be a free 
play of the mind on all subjects which it touches ; by 
steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, 
political, practical considerations about ideas which 
plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which 
perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in 
this country at any rate are certain to be attached to 
them quite sufficiently, but which criticism has really 
nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, 
simply to know the best that is known and thought in 
the world, and, by in its turn making this known, to 
create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business 
is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability ; 
but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all 
questions of practical consequences and applications, 
questions which will never fail to have due prominence 



118 THE MODERN NOVEL 

given to them. Else criticism, besides being really 
false to its own nature, merely continues in the old 
rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, and 
will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For 
what is at present the bane of criticism in this coun- 
try ? It is that practical considerations cling to it and 
stifle it ; it subserves interests not its own ; our organs 
of criticism are organs of men and parties having prac- 
tical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends 
are the first thing, and the play of mind the second ; so 
much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecu- 
tion of those practical ends is all that is wanted. . . . 
It must needs be that men should act in sects and 
parties, that each of these sects and parties should 
have its organ, and should make this organ subserve 
the interests of its action; but it would be well, too, 
that there should be a criticism, not the minister of 
these interests, not their enemy, but absolutely and 
entirely independent of them. No other criticism will 
ever attain any real authority or make any real way 
towards its end, — the creating a current of true and 
fresh ideas. 

' ' It is because criticism has so little kept in the pure 
intellectual sphere, has so little detached itself from 
practice, has been so directly polemical and controver- 
sial, that it has so ill accomplished, in this country, 
its best spiritual work ; which is to keep man from a 
self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, to 
lead him towards perfection, by making his mind 
dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute 
beauty and fitness of things. A polemical practical 



DIDACTICISM 119 

criticism makes men blind even to the ideal imperfec- 
tion of their practice, makes them willingly assert its 
ideal perfection, in order the better to secure it 
against attack; and clearly this is narrowing and 
baneful for them. If they were reassured on the prac- 
tical side, speculative considerations of ideal perfec- 
tion they might be brought to entertain, and their 
spiritual horizon would thus gradually widen. . . . 

"It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect 
action which I am thus prescribing for criticism, and 
that, by embracing in this manner the Indian virtue 
of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical 
life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. 
Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper 
work of criticism. The mass of mankind will never 
have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; 
very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On 
these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the 
general practice of the world. That is as much as 
saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they 
are will find himself one of a very small circle; but 
it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own 
work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. 
The rush and roar of practical life will always have 
a dizzying and attracting effect upon the most col- 
lected spectator, and tend to draw him into its vortex ; 
most of all will this be the case where that life is so 
powerful as it is in England. But it is only by re- 
maining collected, and refusing to lend himself to the 
point of view of the practical man, that the critic can 
do the practical man any service ; and it is only by the 



120 THE MODERN NOVEL 

greatest sincerity in pursuing his own course, and by 
at last convincing even the practical man of his sin- 
cerity, that he can escape misunderstandings which 
perpetually threaten him." 1 

Substitute, here, "fiction" and "novelist" for "crit- 
icism" and "critic," and "English-speaking coun- 
tries" for "England," and Arnold serves our purpose 
not less well than he did his own. The passage cited 
identifies a partisan criticism, as I wish to identify a 
partisan fiction, with the sentimental Pharisaism of 
those who have interests to serve. From our two 
general objections to the partisan fiction — first, that it 
is invented expressly to prove something and can 
therefore prove nothing; second, that the novel has a 
greater privilege than to prove any controversial point 
— it will be evident that the preacher in fiction is in an 
altogether different category from that of the preacher 
in the pulpit. The point of the difference is not 
always seen, to be sure : one sometimes hears it urged : 
"But why should you not listen to the novelist's ser- 
mon as well as to the preacher's? Why should you 
not let the novelist, if he be also a moralist, lay down 
prescriptions of conduct? Why listen to the ethicist 
and the priest of religion, and not to him ? Is not the 
counsel of these other two a valuable guide?" To 
which the answer is, Only if they too be disinterested. 
The priest does not decide by political interest whom 
he wishes elected, and then derive his religious prin- 
ciples from his political interest; the sociologist does 
not divide his world into those whom it would profit 

i The Function of Criticism at the Present Time. 



DIDACTICISM 121 

him to put into office and those whom it would profit 
him to put into jail, and then frame his prescription 
for society accordingly. At least, if he did we should 
do very well to distrust him also. Neither properly 
chooses his evidence to demonstrate a point : the point 
is considered as existing elsewhere and independently, 
for the one as part of a law which altereth not, for 
the other in the nature of society as it is constituted. 
It is obvious that the partisan novelist cannot be, in 
this sense, disinterested at all. Whether he chooses 
the facts and finds a principle to embrace them, or 
chooses the principle and finds the facts to illustrate 
it, he is serving an interest other than that with 
which he has his proper concern — the truth of life, 
how things are and how they work together for good 
and for evil. 



IV 



It is the intention of the argument thus far, not 
exactly to show that didactic art is bad art, but to 
show that art is likely to be bad in so far as it is 
didactic — that is, the didactic element in it is a handi- 
cap, one more thing for it to succeed in spite of. Art 
that is nothing but didactic flatly fails; but in mod- 
ern conditions it is wholly unlikely that a writing man 
will turn to the novel if his sole equipment is a set of 
moral precepts which he holds for ultimate truths. 
The evangelical novel, despite a few transient vogues 
such as that of the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon, — 
In His Steps will serve, for those who remember it, 



122 THE MODERN NOVEL 

to represent the whole school, — is pretty nearly de- 
funct ; and the didactic novel when its propagandizing 
is secular is always written by an author who has in 
him something, however obnubilated, of the artist. 

That a novel may compete with some success against 
its own didacticism is shown in the rather illustrious 
history of protest in the novel. We might go back 
and retrace this from the indictment of debtors' 
prisons in The Vicar of Wakefield; or we might begin 
with such protests against institutions as those of 
Dickens against a certain type of private school in 
Nicholas Nickleby and of Reade against a certain type 
of private asylum for the insane, and against the 
laws relating to insanity, in Hard Cash. But, for one 
sufficiently coherent and centralized illustration, we 
need go no farther than the so-called "novel of pro- 
test" of the '50 's and '60 's. 

The novels of this school are the fictional counter- 
part of the Chartist movement. The protest was 
against the industrial system of Great Britain — the 
exploitation of the labouring class, absentee landlord- 
ism, child labour, the fearful housing conditions of 
manufacturing districts, the long hours and unsani- 
tary surroundings of work, merciless competition, and 
all the political applications of Benthamism and the 
Utilitarian philosophy as interpreted by those who 
liked the liberalism of Mill less than his rigour; in 
short, against the political and economic facts which, 
helped out by the lean crops of famine years, created 
all that was most unbearable in the "hungry '40 's." 
Fiction, in its protest against these facts, sounds often 



DIDACTICISM 123 

like the sincere but ranting, inflammatory, and head- 
long utterances of the most modern socialistic dema- 
gogue of a violent type. 

It is my present point that these novels were saved, 
not by the remedies proposed or the argument ad- 
vanced, but solely by the amount of life they ob- 
jectively depicted and by the open-eyed' sympathy 
which they displayed for it., Disraeli attacked the 
intolerable conditions in his Sybil, — also entitled The 
Two Nations, i. e., the exploiter and the exploited, — 
and he saw the remedy in the infusion of a new sin- 
cerity and courage into the legislative system of 
England. Kingsley attacked them in Yeast and 
Alton Locke, his two burning indictments of the agri- 
cultural labourer's life in the country and of the 
artisan's in the city, and he saw the remedy in that 
" muscular Christianity" with which his name is 
commonly joined in some other connections. Mrs. 
Gaskell attacked them in Mary Barton, to my mind by 
all odds the most powerful book and still one of the 
most readable books of this whole school and period; 
and the remedy that she proposed was simply Chris- 
tian sympathy, exhibited by the employe in forgiving 
his employer for wrongs done, and by the employer 
in so far unbending as to see the common humanity 
in his employe. It is significant that Mrs. Gaskell, 
when she wrote North and South a few years later, 
saw the burden of guilt as being somewhat differently 
distributed, and blamed the employe more, the em- 
ployer less. The remedy was still to understand and 
forgive, but the need of forgiveness was no longer 



124 THE MODERN NOVEL 

confined to one side of the contention. Thus a great 
authoress, somewhat unfortunately known best by her 
most flawless novel, Cranford, and not by her most 
striking, saw the impermanence of part of her own 
didacticism, and made its insufficiency a matter of 
record. 

In all these stories of rebellious protest, the 
value lies, I say, not in the accusations or the proposed 
remedies, but in the truthful depiction of what con- 
ditions were, and what they did to human men and 
women and children. The truth revealed and the 
compassion evoked are enough, in the best of these 
stories, to carry the burden of theories that pass, solu- 
tions that do not solve, and economic doctrines that 
grow laughably archaic. 

And the best of evangelical fiction shows the work- 
ing of the same law. We value the Quo Vadis of the 
lamented Henry Sienkiewicz, not as a piece of Chris- 
tian apologetics, not as a sort of sublimated muck- 
raking of paganism, but as a delineation of what 
Christianity and Christian heroism and martyrdom 
were, and as an analysis of the chemical reaction that 
necessarily followed when Christianity and paganism 
were bottled up together in a part of the world too 
small to hold both. And if Kingsley's Eypatia may 
be said to live still, it lives only in so far as it did 
for Alexandria what Quo Vadis did for Rome. Mrs. 
Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, a quasi-didactic 
anti-evangelical novel, is still impressive, not because 
it tries to prove that the modern man, if truly 
courageous and thoughtful, can no longer believe the 



DIDACTICISM 125 

literal teachings of the Church, but because it shows, 
at once intensely and t} r pically, the ferment of some 
modern doubts in the mind which will have truth at 
whatever cost. In all stories of which the contro- 
versial element is a part, whatever lasting value there 
is resides in the authenticity of the characters, the 
importance of the amount and kind of life faithfully 
portrayed, and the author's success in subordinating 
his own crotchets and private views to the complex 
actualities of the struggle which he undertakes to 
stage. A story is not necessarily bad if it contain a 
temporal issue didactically resolved and brought to 
some specious finality. But it is certainly harder for 
such a story to be good. Didacticism is not the death- 
warrant of a novel, but it is assuredly not the way of 
life for it either. 



On the whole it is safe to say, then, that didacticism 
is essentially an inartistic spirit. It is among the 
conceivable possibilities that a novel written primarily 
for a didactic purpose might turn out to be a good 
story in all the necessary artistic ways; but the ex- 
cellence of such a novel would be in the last degree 
accidental, and it is quite certain that a finely conscien- 
tious artist would not project a story in the sermoniz- 
ing spirit. There are trick pictures which in certain 
lights reveal hidden faces or, inverted, become other 
pictures entirely ; and it is always possible that one of 
them might turn out to be a good picture. But a real 



126 THE MODERN NOVEL 

painter is concerned with something better than the 
production of such curiosities. The didactic . strain 
in an otherwise good novel is like the concealed trick 
of the picture: it is no more important to the good- 
ness of the novel than the Baconian cryptograms, sup- 
posing them to exist, are to the goodness of the 
Shakspere plays. A moral precept hampers the 
work of fiction ; and the question for criticism to ask 
of the didactic novel is, How much else is there to 
offset the serious fault ? The trouble with the ' ' prob- 
lem" play or novel, if the problem is really important, 
is the substitution of a false and arbitrary selective 
principle for the only valid principle. The material 
is assembled to prove a contentious opinion, not to 
represent life by facts chosen for their interest. 

Are we then obliged, on these or similar grounds, 
to deny an allegory, such as Pilgrim's Progress, its 
acknowledged claim to a place among works of art? 
Indeed no : whether self -evidently or not, this form is 
an exception to the general indictment. Didactic it 
is, and partisan, but in a special way, and within a 
special realm of its own. I can express the matter no 
more pointedly than by saying that the allegory is 
nothing but didacticism. There is no other purpose 
than to clothe in striking and ingenious garb the moral 
precepts in which the allegory has its origin. In other 
words, an allegory is simply an extended figure of 
speech, a self-propagating metaphor; and the only 
artistic questions it raises are, first, whether it is an 
effective expression of its meaning and, second, 
whether it has in itself force and beauty. The di- 



DIDACTICISM 127 

dactic novel pretends to be doing one thing while 
really doing something else that is incompatible with 
the first thing; it makes an interested argument and 
offers it as a disinterested story. In allegory, the 
moral argument is the world in which the whole work 
is conceived, lives, moves, and has its being. It is in 
essence a set of convictions given shape as dramatis 
personae, just as a proper pageant is tradition or geog- 
raphy or history come alive to teach us through the 
eye and the ear. There is no clash in allegory be- 
tween a moral purpose and an ostensibly disinter- 
ested reading of life, simply because there is no os- 
tensibly disinterested reading of life. 

Are we then to fall back on art that is ll unmoral" 
— i. e., without any moral signification whatever ? Is 
the rejection of didacticism the acceptance of sestheti- 
cism, art for art? By no means. Art can never be 
"unmoral" so long as either he who makes it or he 
who enjoys remains a moral being — and whatever art 
exists for, it is certainly not for itself. We are pro- 
foundly and eternally right when we assert that all 
fiction has some sort of moral basis, sound or unsound, 
and that, other things being equal, the excellence of 
the fiction will be in proportion to the soundness of 
its moral basis. What then do we mean by such state- 
ments, and how are they to be reconciled with our 
objections to the fiction which is preachment? 

It is useful at this point to recall our preliminary 
distinction between the novelist's purpose in writing 
his book, and the meaning we get out of that book after 
it is written. The novelist's purpose, I asserted, is 



128 THE MODERN NOVEL 

reducible always to a disinterested search for the na- 
ture of life, what life is; his meaning, I may now 
assert, is his character — what he is. He may not 
wilfully intrude himself into the spectacle; but he is 
there none the less, by the very nature of the relation 
between the creator and the thing created. He may 
not have uttered a single sentiment avowedly his own ; 
but he is in the whole composition, the whole com- 
position is in the truest, most inescapable sense him- 
self. Certain characters have been shown, certain 
issues proposed and fought out with some sort of 
spiritual or material triumph, sympathies have been 
attracted by some things in the spectacle and repelled 
by others — and all these matters are the artist's own 
moral choice, his character objectified. The persons 
he chooses to depict, the issues that are in his eyes 
important enough to be struggled over, the kind of 
triumph won, the direction taken by the reader's sym- 
pathy, even the very omissions and suppressions — all 
these things are the measure of the novelist's will, of 
the deep unconscious self which he can no more help 
expressing than the phenomena of nature can help 
expressing natural law. 

It is that deep unconscious self that must, we say, be 
morally sound. The reader's sympathy must be made 
to take right directions ; the interest must be drawn to 
things that over-top mere differences of opinion; the 
set of values implied in the given story must be those 
to which the moral judgment of mankind instinctively 
responds. Think what you will about property rights, 
democracy and autocracy, marriage, slavery, socialism, 



DIDACTICISM 129 

revealed religion, you are never in any serious doubt 
about what is admirable and what detestable in men 
and women so long as your self-interest is not touched. 
And you say that a novel is morally sound when it 
makes you feel, without necessarily bothering to think, 
that the novelist is a person who admires and detests 
the same fundamental things that everybody else 
worth hearing admires and detests. 

We have heard Dr. Samuel Johnson censure our 
English Shakspere for his objectivity: Shakspere 
"carries his persons indifferently through right and 
wrong, and, at the close, dismisses them without fur- 
ther care, and leaves their example to operate by 
chance." But does it operate by chance? Does it 
not operate about the same way on every one of us? 
Professor Stuart Sherman, in a recent essay, The 
Humanism of Shakspere, 1 points out that after all no 
one of us can possibly be in doubt whom of the 
Shakspere characters we were meant to admire, whom 
to love, whom to regard indulgently despite their 
shortcomings, whom to laugh at, whom to loathe. The 
character may not receive justice on the stage, — in 
tragedy he seldom does, — but he always receives it in 
the audience, says Professor Sherman. And that is 
the only moral effect that counts at all in art. The 
moral basis of art is the moral consciousness of the 
race. 

"To make the world better" may be, as John- 
son says, a writer 's duty ; but it is hardly a duty that 

i Reprinted in Main Tendencies in Contemporary Literature. 
By Stuart P. Sherman. New York: Henry Holt and Com- 
pany. 



130 THE MODERN NOVEL 

he can perform the better for being aware of it. He 
must have his eye outward upon the world ; and if he 
succeed in making the world better, it will be because 
his eye is such that he cannot help seeing the right 
things with the right relative values. His purpose 
must be only the truth. His moral meaning to us will 
be exactly what he is. Whatever a novel is or is not, 
it is inevitably a close and full revelation of the moral 
.sensibilities of the man who wrote it. It must, 
whether he will it to or not, express his ethical ac- 
ceptance of life. In this sense the most "objective" 
piece of art ever penned on paper, painted on canvas, 
or carved in stone is as subjective as the most de- 
liberately intimate self-revelation. 



V 
SATIRE 



We have now come, I think, to the point where this 
argument about the purpose and the meaning of 
fiction begins to have a shape and a recognizable di- 
rection. I have proposed, as (the purpose and highest 
general end of fiction, the attainment of disinterested- 
ness or impersonality. Leaving aside for the moment 
the hundred technical questions of .method and de- 
sign, we begin to see that whatever furthers and en- 
forces this quality is theoretically to be desired, and 
whatever impedes or befogs it to be deplored. The 
sentimental spirit and the didactic or preaching spirit, 
two influences of a close cousinship, fall into their 
places in the argument as two of the principal forces 
which defeat impersonality or disinterestedness. The 
relation between these two is that of a greater and a 
lesser — or, if we must have a distinction, let didacti- 
cism be the cant of the mind, sentimentalism the more 
fundamental cant of the soul. The two are one at 
least in the egotism which gives them breath and be- 
ing ; the didactic feeling is sentimental egotism with a 
specialized twist. We have seen also that Comedy, 
"the laughter of the mind/' is the mortal enemy of 
sentimentalists in general. Here is the basic conflict, 
that between impartial and partisan, between disinter- 
ested and egotistical. We shall have enlarged the 
argument and deepened its foundation still further on 

133 



134 THE MODERN NOVEL 

this other side, the constructive, as soon as we have 
seen that, just as didacticism is the sentimental spirit 
specialized, so Comedy is only a specialized and con- 
centrated mode of the spirit which always opposes the 
egotism in fiction — the spirit which we may broadly 
and loosely name Satire. 

For the sake, then, of generalizing the historical 
conflict between two tendencies, I take our two im- 
portant and familiar words and do some apparent 
violence to them by giving each the largest, least tech- 
nical definition possible. Sentimentalism is the spirit 
that enjoys; in fiction, it is a preponderance of the 
emotional element. Satire is the spirit that protests ; 
and nearly always so far it has constituted the intel- 
lectual element in fiction. The sentimentalist feels 
more than he thinks; we measure him by his enjoy- 
ments. The satirist thinks more than he feels, and 
we measure him by his aversions. Unreflective sym- 
pathy and reflective hatred, these are the two great 
opposed spirits of fiction, the self-interest and the dis- 
interestedness of the novel as we know it in history. 

There can be no great difficulty about the use of 
our two words in this somewhat lax way : we use words 
as we will, so long as it is kept before us exactly how 
we are using them. But there is a seeming paradox 
in the assertion that the hatred in fiction is more 
intellectual than the sympathy. Enjoyment is a 
purely personal predilection, indeed: but is not hate 
a personal predilection inverted? Is there anything 
more intellectual in choosing arbitrarily against a 
thing than in choosing arbitrarily for it? Why 



SATIRE 



are not both matters of caprice, of temperamental ac- 
cident merely? In ethics, perhaps they are; not, I 
think, in literature. Onr retort may well be that, in 
the novel, enjoyment remains as arbitrary as in per- 
sonal experience, whereas : n ceases to be purely 
arbitrary by the very fact of its successful transfer- 
ence to literature. Yon may love with no argument 
beyond the wholly personal one of your own quick- 
ened intuitions and sympathies. And so, in practical 
life, you may hate, with no argument except that of 
the nerves. But put your hatred into a book, and 
you have to make some show of impersonal justifi- 
cation for it; you have to imply categories, dis- 
criminations, and find other than merely personal 
excuses for them. In short, you have to adduce 
plenty of sound logical reasons why other persons, 
your readers among them, should hate as you do. In 
actual practice, then, hate turns out to be the more 
impersonal feeling — the more reasoned, the more in- 
tellectual, the more disinterested, and by all odds the 
more social. 

Theorizing, it will have appeared, lends some col- 
our of probability to the contrast as I hare just stated 
it. Now, to come from theory to history. It hap- 
pens that we can observe the workings of these two 
forces, the self-asserting love and the self forgetting 
hate, especially well in English fiction, because in 
English fiction rather more than elsewhere the novel 
has achieved greatness rather through splendid par- 
ticular excesses than through the balance and match- 
ing of all qualities. Whenever the novel has not had 



136 THE MODERN NOVEL 

the heart-ache of sensibility, it has had the head-ache 
of ratiocination. 

We see the duel between the man of feeling and 
the man of reflection, not begun, indeed, but mo- 
mentously represented, in Richardson and Fielding. 
We can follow it through their descendants to the 
edge of our own generation. The novel has grown, 
as Dean Briggs says colts and young boys do, "one 
end at a time, ' ' and its major prophets are those who 
have obviously thought more than they felt or felt 
more than they thought. I do not of course mean to 
blame Richardson and Fielding for all, or most, that 
clutters our modern field, though they do seem proto- 
typical of a great deal of it. But one must insist on 
what they broadly represent: the general contest be- 
tween thinking and feeling, the everlasting tug-of-war 
between temperaments, which in each generation has 
pulled at fiction and stretched it more or less out of 
shape, giving it here a decided bulge toward the emo- 
tional, there the opposite bulge toward the intellectual, 
as sentimentalism or satire has predominated. And 
it oddly appears everywhere, in confirmation of my 
present point, that the intellectualist is a person whom 
we remember by his dislikes, and describe in terms of 
the things he makes war on. So far in the history 
of fiction, there is a link between emotionalism and 
irresponsibility, between intellect and responsibility. 
The personal aversions are more closely reasoned than 
the personal predilections. Richardson loved, with all 
his sensibilities, some things that do not commend 



SATIRE 137 



themselves to the intelligence; and Fielding — to put 
the matter shortly — hated Richardson. The ' ' Gothic ' ' 
romance loved spookery and neurasthenia for their 
own sakes; Jane Austen hated those things for the 
sake of common sense. It would make a long story 
if one were to recount the hatreds of Dickens — for 
brutal schools and brutal prisons, for the injustice 
and incompetence of the law, for the pretentiousness 
and coxcombry of church and press and forum. We 
can summarize Dickens in this context by saying that 
even the characters whom he loves are presented to 
us in terms of the things they rationally hate, as the 
elder Weller in terms of his most rational hatred of 
Stiggins. 

If one had, then, to affix a single label to the evo- 
lution of fiction in the last hundred and fifty years, 
that label would be the search for impersonality, for 
a larger way of looking at things than the way of 
merely capricious preference. From Lyly to Rich- 
ardson fiction gropes for realism of method and of 
detail — for verisimilitude. From Richardson to 
Thomas Hardy, the period when the novel was attain- 
ing its majority as a formal art, it groped for disinter- 
estedness, intellectual strength, a social point of view. 
Sensibility could not supply these, because it was not 
critical enough; reasoned antipathies, oftenest sharp- 
ened with scorn, supplied or tended to supply them in 
terms of adverse criticism — or, as I have put it in a 
roughly summarizing term, Satire. 



138 THE MODERN NOVEL 



II . 

We ought perhaps to retrace enough steps to find 
the distinction between this general spirit of protest, 
or Satire, and didacticism. Both of them take a 
stand, both are designed to instruct; but the stand 
taken by satire is against rather than for something, 
and it instructs us in what to avoid, not in what to do. 
The difference is that between affirmative and nega- 
tive. What to do can be one of the most difficult of 
human problems, soluble after all more in terms of 
motives than in terms of actions themselves — a point 
which didactic writers nearly always miss. But what 
to reject, what to loathe — this is oftenest a much 
easier problem. The socializing influence of hatred 
is a subject hardly done justice to in the theorizing 
of moral economists, who will have perhaps somewhat 
to learn from the vast and terrific exhibitions of that 
very principle among great modern nations at war. 

Most persons, even those of extremely divergent 
positive tastes, can finding footing of solidarity in 
endless common aversions. Henry James gave, in 
The American, a sentence of proof how he under- 
stood this potentiality in the unlovely side of human 
nature. Christopher Newman, outraged and humili- 
ated, sees, as he reflects upon the family which has done 
him a calculated wrong, that their conjoint will to in- 
jure was after all, in its way, an aspiration above in- 
dividual self-seeking: ". . . it was a link for them, 
perhaps, their having so hurt him." 1 This is not an 

i The American, Chapter XXVI. 



SATIRE 139 



achievement of community on the highest possible 
plane, this solidarity of hatred in a nation, a class, or 
a family ; but it is at least not all evil. We shall find 
perhaps that neither is the hatred in fiction the ulti- 
mate moral achievement; but it is at least a moral 
achievement, as the merely basking and irresponsible 
enjoyment quite fails to be. Satire, like didacticism, 
does then affirm something, but only a negative some- 
thing — a denial. The novel cannot recommend a 
cause without preaching; but it can riddle a cause, 
it can point the scornful finger, without so^pre judi- 
cially committing itself. 

I have said that satire is clearly negative instead 
of affirmative ; but this does not mean that it is neces- 
sarily destructive instead of constructive. It is an 
axiom of literature, whatever may be said of politics 
and religion, that some sort of destruction is often the 
only possible kind of construction. Satire has at dif- 
ferent times — notably in verse of the second third 
of the 18th century — fallen to the low estate of a 
convention ; the accent of Juvenal has become the ac- 
cent of fashion. But at its best satire is the gesture 
of idealism and of righteous human indignation in 
the presence of abuses not to be borne ; the natural re- 
sponse of the moral sense to the various affronts by 
injustice and corruption in a world out of joint, or 
seen by the satirist as being out of joint. When there 
is so much for ordinary decency to loathe, how idle to 
give one's self up to tender dreaming! this is the 
mood underlying really noble satire. The method 
may be destructive, but the spirit is something more. 



140 THE MODERN NOVEL 

The best satire of Swift, of Goldsmith, of Dickens, 
even of Smollett — is it not at once both humanistic 
and humanitarian in its effect ? To denounce a wrong 
is to enforce some alternative right; when the heart 
is made to burn most hotly against obvious injustices, 
then it is nearest to melting in that pity and fear 
which, according to Aristotle, are the purifying emo- 
tions of tragedy. And even when the satire is cold, 
as it commonly is when given the inflection known as 
irony, it still makes us hate in a greater cause than 
self-interest, and encourages us to want noble things 
while resenting ignoble ones. Any one can verify for 
himself this constructive and humanizing power of 
rightly directed aversion, by considering for a mo- 
ment Fielding's picture of hypocrisy in Blifil, George 
Eliot's of weak infidelity in Tito Melema, Hardy's of 
narrow self-righteous goodness in Angel Clare, or any 
of a hundred other portraits of characters whom we 
were meant to admire as inventions but to detest as 
personal embodiments of certain traits. 

Satire makes hatred impressive and valid, in short, 
whenever it makes it most nearly universal. If it be 
asked whether the satirist is not in some danger of 
tumbling into the pitfall of sentimentalism and of 
missing a just breadth of appeal by stressing aversions 
not belonging to our common human idealism, we may 
indeed concede the point. And for illustration of it 
we have to look no farther than to Swift as he wrote 
in the hours when, carried along on the force of his 
own invective and lashing himself into a misanthropic 
fury, he ceased to make the good hate the evil in man 



SATIRE 141 



and portrayed all humankind as evil utterly. In the 
last book of Gulliver's Travels, where man is exclu- 
sively a Yahoo and all his character is in "the teeth 
and the claws," pity recoils upon the author himself, 
and fear shrivels us more than it purines. Satire is 
purging only when it points to aversions which we can 
all be made to share; when it denounces inhumanity 
for the sake of humanity. It is beside the point to de- 
nounce humanity, for to do that is to reject everything. 
Satire must keep its categories and discriminations; 
and they must be founded on principles which go 
deeper than argument, principles which we are bound 
to hold to by virtue of our existence as social human 
beings of a common origin, common interests, and a 
common destiny. 



Ill 



This paradox, the constructive potentiality of a 
method purely negative, appears in the most elab- 
orate examples of satire of the type voyage imaginaire, 
all the way from The Ultimate Things Beyond Thule 
by Antonius Diogenes [?] to M. Anatole France's 
L'lle des Pingouins, and, in classic English, from De- 
foe's Memoirs of Sundry Transactions in the World of 
the Moon and Swift's Gulliver to the late Samuel But- 
ler's Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited. All of these 
are the Utopian romance more or less inverted. I pass 
over this form, with but this incidental note, in order 
to come to a still more refined and specialized applica- 
tion of satire which has rather more to do with the 



142 THE MODERN NOVEL 

realistic novel; a genre of satire reduced to a formal, 
calculated, and sustained system of irony, of which we 
have two illustrious examples in English, separated 
by almost exactly a century: Fielding's Jonathan 
Wild the Great and Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, the 
second of these in definite and unmistakable imitation 
of the first. 

These are the old picaresque novel in an elaborate 
mask. Their subject matter is unscrupulous but pic- 
turesque roguery ; their method is to hold that roguery 
up to mock admiration, very much as Swift, in such 
essays as A Modest Proposal, affects a mock admira- 
tion for the ruthless inhumanity of oppressors of the 
poor. Jonathan Wild is a personage of undeviating 
criminality; the beautiful consistency of his life is 
marred by scarce a single generous deed or decent 
impulse. From the time of his youthful captaincy 
over a gang of orchard robbers, when he was invari- 
ably "treasurer of the booty, some little part of which 
he would now and then, with wonderful generosity, 
bestow on those who took it," until his consummation 
on the scaffold or "tree of glory," when he found 
breath to deliver "a hearty curse" upon the as- 
sembled crowd, he showed himself to be "not re- 
strained by any of those weaknesses which disappoint 
the views of mean and vulgar souls, and which are 
comprehended in one general term of honesty, which 
is a corruption of HONOSTY, a word derived from 
what the Greeks call an ass." From the title-page to 
the closing sentence there is an incessant harping on 
the word "greatness," used in this scheme of irony 



SATIRE 143 



to mean material success without moral goodness. 
And when, near the end, Fielding reduces the career 
of his infamous protagonist to a list of elementary 
principles of " greatness, " behold! that list exactly 
defines and delineates the practices by which Fielding 
saw eminence achieved in the most respected careers 
of his own 18th century world. His purpose is 
to show how a boot-licking society worshipped pres- 
tige no matter how gained; his method is to draw a 
grotesque parallel between the successful man of the 
great world and the successful criminal of the under- 
world, and to signify that the one is as little worthy 
of admiration as the other. This catalogue of prin- 
ciples, as applicable to a Robert Walpole as to a Jona- 
than Wild, seems to me to be among the most ingenious 
and pointed uses of savage irony in English : 

"1. Never to do more mischief to another than was nec- 
essary to the effecting of his purpose; for that mis- 
chief was too precious a thing to be thrown away. 

"2. To know no distinction of men from affection ; but to 
sacrifice all with equal readiness to his interest. 

"3. Never to communicate more of an affair than was 
necessary to the person who was to execute it. 

"4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who 
knows he hath been deceived by you. 

"5. To forgive no enemy; but to be cautious and often 
dilatory in revenge. 

"6. To shun poverty and distress, but to ally himself as 
close as possible to power and riches. 

"7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and 
behaviour, and to affect wisdom on all occasions. 

"8. To foment eternal jealousies in his gang, one of an- 
another. 



144 THE MODERN NOVEL 

"9. Never to reward any one equal to his merit; but al- 
ways to insinuate that the reward was above it. 

"10. That all men were knaves or fools, and much the 
greater number a composition of both. 

"11. That a good name, like money, must be parted with, 
or at least greatly risked, in order tcv, bring the owner 
any advantage. 

"12. That virtues, like precious stones, were easily coun- 
terfeited ; that the counterfeits in both cases adorned 
the wearer equally, and that very few had knowledge 
or discernment sufficient to distinguish the counter- 
feit jewel from the real. 

"13. That many men were undone by not going deep 
enough in roguery; as in gaming any man may be a 
loser who doth not play the whole game. 

"14. That men proclaim their own virtues, as shopkeepers 
expose their goods, in order to profit by them. 

"15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the 
countenance of affection and friendship." l 

This extraordinary satire of Fielding, and Thack- 
eray's more sprightly imitation of it, serve well 
enough to introduce us to one of the great questions 
of artistic economy in the novel: To what extent 
is it expedient, and to what extent right, for fiction 
to specialize in the vicious, the criminal, the de- 
cadent, the morbid ? Is it good taste, and is it ethical, 
for art to deal extensively with what is inherently 
forbidding or repulsive? Of course these two pieces 
of irony do not actually help us answer the question, 
because they mean the opposite of what they say ; but 
they do interestingly suggest the question. And we 
have to face that question squarely in such stories as 
deal literally with evil character and action. 

i Jonathan Wild the Great, Book IV, Chapter XII. 



SATIRE 145 



Theoretically and a priori, we should have to say 
that art ought to encourage and inspirit us, not de- 
press. But instantly there arises another question: 
May not it truly hearten and inspirit us, by indirec- 
tion, through display of things to be shunned, and 
through the moral recoil provoked by such dis- 
play? And there is obviously something to be said 
in the affirmative. Mr. Chesterton, speaking particu- 
larly of Fielding and Tom Jones, says: "We have 
grown to associate morality in a book with a kind of 
optimism and prettiness; according to us, a moral 
book is a book about moral people. But the old idea 
was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a 
book about immoral people. A moral book was full 
of pictures like Hogarth's Gin Lane or Stages of 
Cruelty, or it recorded, like the popular broadsheet, 
God's Dreadful Judgment against some blasphemer 
or murderer. . . . Telling the truth about the terrible 
struggle of the human soul is surely a very elemen- 
tary part of the ethics of honesty. If the characters 
are not wicked, the book is. " x 

As a matter of fact, though, it is not very helpful 
to try to answer such questions theoretically and a 
priori. They have to be answered historically, with 
reference to that which has proved itself excellent. 
And we find, whether we begin with Euripides or 
with Chaucer or with Shakspere or with Fielding, 
that no very enduring writer has tried to shirk the 
problem of evil. Some of the characters who are 

i All Things Considered. By G. K. Chesterton. New York: 
John Lane Co. MCMIX. Pp. 264-66. 



146 THE MODERN NOVEL 

greatest as creations are least great as moral beings; 
some of the books which most develop and crystallize 
our moral ideas do so through the presentation of 
guilt. To summarize, still measuring by this same 
very handy yardstick of what has proved itself of en- 
during merit, we can make out at least these few ten- 
able principles: 

First, the artist's business is with the whole of life; 
and there is no department or phase of it into which 
he may not go, granted only enough conscience and 
enough skill. 

Secondly, he must have that conscience and that 
skill : we must feel the soundness of his purpose, and 
there must be no blurring of moral values, no false 
glamour to make us forget that we are supposed to be 
reading a criticism of life performed under certain 
standards. Evil when shown in books can serve no 
self -justifying purpose unless it is known as evil. We 
see an infringement of this law in a modern fashion 
of sentimentalizing crime and criminals, and in a cur- 
rent fashion of looking so indulgently upon the 
tawdry philanderings of sexually irresponsible per- 
sons as to carry indulgence over- into a sort of per- 
verted evangelism of the fleshly lusts. 

Thirdly, if the artist lack critical sense, if he tacitly 
accept evil as normal, or as indistinguishable from 
good, he is convicted by his own handiwork; he has 
palpably made the worse appear the better reason — 
in which event he pays, as history abundantly proves, 
the penalty of a speedy oblivion. The dogma of "Art 
for Art's sake" is eminently productive of this danger 



SATIRE 147 



— Art being unintelligible except as a ministration to 
the highest pleasures of man, and the pleasures of the 
gratified moral sense being surely among those 
highest. 

All of life, then, is open to the artist ; and we may 
say that the quintessence of art is some sort of strug- 
gle, on a higher or lower plane, between something 
which ought to enlist the moral sympathies of the 
reader and something else which ought to repel them. 
But the artist is responsible for the meaning of that 
struggle and for the plane on which it takes place; 
and if the meaning be perverted or the plane a low one, 
there is no excusing the artist on the ground of his 
invisible good intention or his honest error or in- 
capacity. 



IV 



It was through the study of evil in character that 
satire achieved the most important development of its 
whole history on the non-technical side — a develop- 
ment which involved something amounting to the de- 
struction of satire as such, and the transmutation of 
it into something still more disinterested and imper- 
sonal. I can state this development succinctly by say- 
ing that, before the 19th century was far advanced, 
the villain passed out of literature. 

The passing of the villain is one of the most inter- 
esting phases of literary history since Jane Austen. 
With the assimilation of the romantic blend of hu- 
manitarianism and individualism, the villain found 



148 THE MODERN NOVEL 

two possible destinies awaiting him. He could become 
the Byronic hero, a superman full of sin and Welt- 
schmerz and glamour, a dark fallen angel, an attitud- 
inizing rebel hero ; or he could become a human being 
just a little on the lower side of the median of average 
human goodness — the victim of accidents in heredity 
or circumstance, a weaker brother but not a com- 
pendium of all possible malice and unscrupulousness. 
Where the romantic individualism triumphed, as in the 
earlier Bulwer-Lytton, the villain became the Byronic 
hero ; where the romantic humanitarianism triumphed, 
as in Dickens, the villain became a human being — 
with a sentimental proclivity, it must be added, for 
becoming in the last chapter an unnaturally good one. 
This epoch, the late Romantic and early Victorian, is 
the epoch of the desperate criminal presented as a 
creature of good impulses misdirected, an ogre who 
might as easily have been an angel if he had had bet- 
ter luck with his parents and his education. The 
Byronic superman we may profitably discard: his 
existence in letters becomes more and more precarious, 
until he passes into juvenile fiction and melodrama — 
for example, the astonishingly ornate and intricate 
melodrama of Wilkie Collins. 

But the other type of converted villain, the type 
which evolves toward average manhood, and not to- 
ward the fallen angels, is of genuine importance. 
Sentimentalized as was the treatment of him before 
1845, illogical and shallow as was the sympathy lav- 
ished upon him in some quarters, notably in parts of 
Dickens, the human villain was to live on and wax 



SATIRE 149 



great, not only overcoming the propensity of his cre- 
ators to weep and sigh over him, but actually over- 
coming in the end the whole practice of satire as an 
unequivocal issue between black and white, evil and 
good. The villain was originated in sentimentalism, 
but he was continued in the scientific spirit. When 
it was once seen that any really interesting villain 
was made up of a great deal of humanity plus a 
certain admixture of evil inclination, it was sure 
to be seen next that any really interesting person 
was a quite similar compound. In other words, as 
soon as the humanitarian feeling and the sense of 
brotherhood became assimilated and rationalized, the 
struggle of fiction became transferred from the stage 
where hero contends against villain to the other stage 
where he contends against the unheroic in himself. 
The issue is just as sharp, just as definitive; the di- 
rection of our moral aversion is no more ambiguous 
than before ; but its object is now only part of a char- 
acter, the weakness or failing of an individual with 
whom on the whole we identify ourselves in sympathy. 
Mankind is no longer classifiable into devils to hate 
and angels to love: 

"Some are fine fellows, some right scurvy; 
Most, a dash between the two" — 

and the task of the novelist and his reader is neither 
to hate nor to love, but to understand. 

Fielding, of course, showed a considerable mastery 
of this mingled affair, human nature, but came too 
early to discard the machinery of the superficial vil- 



150 THE MODERN NOVEL 

lain. He gives us, roughly, a heroine who is perfect 
angel, a villain who is perfect devil except that he is 
not a gentleman, and a hero who is indeed ' ' a dash be- 
tween the two, ' ' a creature near to the human average. 
Jane Austen, whose genius is throughout one of rare 
and almost miraculous anticipations, is most of all in 
advance of the novel of her day in this respect, the com- 
plete human credibility of practically all her puppets. 
Historically, the full fruition of the modern scientific 
and impersonal interest in evil occurs in George Eliot. 
The first of great English novelists to come to her 
proper work from philosophy and the abstract sci- 
ences, she is before all else the analyst of that sin 
which is omission, and the cause of which is weak- 
ness. She studies, in one crucial instance after an- 
other, the balance of power between opposed forces 
in the single character ; and she never makes the mis- 
take of alienating her character from our sympathy 
by creating him a prodigy of either moral extreme. 
Even when we study her weaklings, such as Tito 
Melema and Geoffrey Cass, aversion is mollified by un- 
derstanding; and in her more balanced characters, 
such as Maggie Tulliver and Romola — they are most 
often women — the presence of tragic limitations is 
precisely what wrings out the last drop of our sym- 
pathy. If we hated the weakness more we should 
understand it less; and if the human imperfections 
were absent the struggle would lose all its moral 
poignancy. In George Eliot's work we see satire be- 
ginning to turn into something else. 



SATIRE 151 



This symptom, the dissolution of the personal vil- 
lain and his re-emergence as the seed of evil or of 
weakness in average human nature, points, then, to 
the development which superseded satire. Sentimen- 
talism came first, with its intuitional and unreflective 
enjoyment ; its limitation was that it got itself valued 
by the intensity of the enjoyment and not by the in- 
herent worth of the things to be enjoyed. Satire fol- 
lowed; a reaction against sentimentalism, and an ap- 
plication of the theory that you could save yourself 
by hating hateful things. Satire is at least, for this 
reason, more disinterested than sentimentalism. But 
the time came, with the decay of dogmatic theology 
and the less authoritative, more experimental inter- 
pretation of moral law, when hatred was seen to be 
anachronistic and not enough. It was better, of course, 
to hate the right things responsibly than to love the 
wrong things, or even the right ones, irresponsibly ; but 
the sincere part of the Victorian humanitarian feeling 
had somewhat changed the emphasis of human affec- 
tions generally. It will be fairly accurate to say that 
after a certain point the 19th century was moved to see 
how many things it could love humanity in spite of; 
that is, how much it could understandingly forgive. 
And its forgiveness was based, not as of old on sensibil- 
ity, on emotional charity, but on the analytical charity 
of comprehension. The world of fiction had a sudden 
vision of how much alike, ultimately, we all are. 



152 THE MODERN NOVEL 

The patient anatomizing which George Eliot per- 
formed upon the conscience and the feeling of per- 
sonal guilt was, as I suggested, the purely rational 
fruit of this new feeling. On the purely tempera- 
mental side, we find its fruit in Thackeray and in 
Anthony Trollope, taking there the shape of their 
rare and unprecedented tolerance for their charac- 
ters. This indulgent and benignant irony of the cre- 
ator toward his creatures is a new strain in the novel. 
Jane Austen, serene in spirit as she was, quietly 
modulated as was her criticism, would have no non- 
sense from her personam ; let Miss Bennet in her preju- 
dice, or Darcy in his unregenerate pride, betray an 
insincerity, and she is always ready with a tart little 
rebuke. She will love them so long as they are hon- 
estly wrong; but let them be guilty of posturing or 
deceiving themselves, and she wastes no sympathy on 
them. Thackeray and Trollope perform the miracle, 
almost lost since Shakspere, of keeping their charac- 
ters vivid and whole in two quite separate provinces : 
one of moral common sense, where we know their 
vices exactly and will tolerate no illusions about their 
worth, and another of pure artistic appreciation, 
where they perpetually divert us by being them- 
selves. Thackeray sustains his and our admiration 
for such designing adventuresses as Becky Sharp and 
Blanche Amory, without ever pretending that they 
are better than they are ; he has at once the personal 
enjoyment of their rarity, and the impersonal esti- 
mate of their moral deficiencies. And one wonders 
whether Trollope could ever possibly have given any 



SATIRE 153 



reader the joy in Mrs. Proudie that he found in her 
himself. She richly merited death; there are many 
chapters which make the reader want to lay violent 
hands on her; yet Trollope long plotted in vain to 
kill her, and when, under the spur of a conversation 
about her overheard in a library, he nerved himself 
to the deed and went home and committed it, he felt 
as though he had actually done murder. This was 
not in the least because he was addicted to inventing 
sentimental extenuations of Mrs. Proudie 's general 
hatefulness and hypocrisy: it was because he had 
known her long and intimately enough to see that she 
could no more help being what she was than Mr. 
Harding could help being what he was. This toler- 
ance, of the intellect alone in some modern persons, 
of the temperament alone in others, is perhaps the 
ultimate human wisdom. At all events, in literature 
it is the end of satire as a formula of methodical 
scorn or ridicule. 

Since Trollope the indulgent view of human nature 
has had its way more and more. The passing of dog- 
matic theology weakens the feeling of a hard-and-fast 
moral law, before which all men are classifiable as 
saints or sinners; the rapid rise and triumph of the 
cosmic sciences make an organic unit of the world 
with all its living creatures, intensifying the percep- 
tion that all are knit together by a common origin 
and a common destiny; the social sciences have their 
birth in this feeling; and it becomes an impossible 
anachronism to hate again in the old unequivocating 
way. One must either renounce the violent antipa- 



154 THE MODERN NOVEL 

thies altogether and replace them by a universal tol- 
erance, or else one must find something larger to hate. 
Not unnaturally, both possibilities come to pass in a 
single generation. Zola in France and Gissing in 
England turned the novel into a sort of laboratory ex- 
periment, impersonally conducted and carefully mea- 
sured; man is analysed in certain of his crucial re- 
lations to his fellowmen. At the same time, Samuel 
Butler was declaiming against man's slavery to his 
heritage from past generations, hating thus a part of 
the general constitution of the world. And before 
long Hardy was to personify all the injustice in the 
world as a malignant God, and set up that God as the 
object of man's puny and ineffectual curses. This is 
as far as satire can go toward the impersonal and 
still be satire. When hatred has turned from actual 
men and women and their actions in order to expend 
itself on an evil principle, it is hatred quite deperson- 
alized. Since 1895 and Jude the Obscure, there is in 
fact hardly a good hater left in British fiction. 



VI 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 



In describing the history of English fiction since 
1740 as a war between sentimentalism and satire, 
which I roughly identified respectively with the emo- 
tional and the intellectual elements in fiction, I had 
in mind a certain great change which has but lately 
come over the spirit of the novel; a change which 
amounts to nothing less than a pact of peace a:ter 
this long feud, and which is so important that it 
seems to promise sweeping changes in the novel of the 
future, a quite different direction and set of intellec- 
tual ideals. I have already mentioned several middle 
and late Victorian symptoms of the struggle of the 
modern novel toward intellectual disinterestedness: 
such symptoms as Thackeray's indulgence toward the 
foibles of his personam, George Eliot's philosophical 
interest in the nature and significance of evil, Samuel 
Butler's analysis of heredity, Hardy's indictment of 
the whole world-purpose as a cruel irresponsibleness, 
and Gissing's researches in sociology; to which we 
may add, of course, Meredith's re-creation of Comedy 
as "the laughter of the mind." All these point to 
the one fact : the passing of the old violent and arbi- 
trary antipathies. Hatred becomes an anachronism 
and contempt an impertinence. A broader interpre- 
tation of what the world -organism is, and of how cause 
interlocks with effect, helps the novelist see that all of 

157 



158 THE MODERN NOVEL 

us equally are what we were made, what we cannot 
help being ; and more and more the ideal goal of fiction 
becomes this elemental truth of cause and effect, the 
truth of what life and character are without reference 
to what the novelist personally would like them to be. 
The old intellectualism of satire was a criticism of 
life in the adverse sense of being a denunciation of 
what it ought not to be. The new intellectualism is a 
criticism of life in the sense of being simply an inter- 
pretation of what life is, beyond our power to help or 
prevent. The temperamental indulgence of Thack- 
eray becomes the philosophical tolerance, the rooted 
conviction, of the present age ; the spirit of satire be- 
comes what I shall call, to distinguish it from the 
realistic technique or method, the new Realistic Spirit. 
I have said that this recent triumph of the realistic 
spirit, the triumph of intellectualism in the novel, 
marks the end of the old war of satirist and sentimen- 
talist; and indeed that is a fact which we need to 
perceive if we are to understand what the fiction of 
the present is about, and what the fiction of the future 
is most likely to be about. Sentimental ism was sym- 
pathy, capriciously and arbitrarily exerted : the realis- 
tic spirit is universal sympathy, an attempt to under- 
stand everything from its own point of view. Satire 
was a half-impersonal attempt to define something 
that everybody ought to hate: the realistic spirit is 
a much more impersonal attempt to show that there 
is nothing human which a really enlightened mind 
ought to hate. The old novel was intellectual about in 
proportion as it was polemical : it thought and fought, 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 159 

or it felt and waxed irresponsible. The new spirit 
makes it at once less polemical and more intellectual. 
The new sympathy is more analytical than the old 
satire — besides being far more inclusive than the old 
sympathy. The realist — I speak of him still as the 
child of his time, the present, peering as far as I can 
through the dust raised by lesser conflicts of fashions 
and personalities — the realist is the legitimate child 
of satirist and sentimentalist. He thinks with his 
sensibilities, feels with his intellect ; criticism and en- 
joyment fuse. Sentimentalism dealt with the egocen- 
tric life, the emotional seemings of things to suscepti- 
ble folk; satire dealt with the ethical life, the possi- 
bilities of things. Our realist records the possibilities 
and the seemings, but not to identify himself with 
either; for he sees them as incidental to the more 
probing queston of what life inscrutably is. 

We may leave aside for the moment the question 
of whether this sweeping change in fiction is a change 
for the better, a growth. I think we can see pretty 
readily that it is inevitable, and that its inevitability 
lifts it above the rank of the mere fashions, the flux 
and reflux, that in every age exert a transient effect 
on the shape and composition of the novel. I can 
best state the importance of this change if I say that 
it is the response of the novel to the corresponding 
change which has come over everything else. Any one 
who will take the trouble to read the polemical and 
controversial writings of such a man as Huxley will 
see how man's conception of the world changed its 
center of gravity in the thirty-five years after the 



160 THE MODERN NOVEL 

publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The 
world as an organization, a product of will, became 
the world as an organism, the product of natural 
law ; the province of faith appeared to shrink and that 
of sight to expand ; the higher criticism had its way, 
first with Moses, then with the four gospels ; and be- 
fore 1890, before the end of Huxley's long controversy 
with Gladstone over The Impregnable Rock of Holy 
Scripture, it was possible for Mrs. Humphry Ward, 
whom it is moderately difficult to think of as a violent 
iconoclast, to write an important novel, Robert Els- 
mere, about the difficulty which any modern man of 
both intelligence and courage must experience in be- 
lieving the dogmas of Christian theology. For good or 
evil, the world had to consider its own meaning and in- 
terpret its own natural history more broadly, less arbi- 
trarily. The natural outcome of this new vision of 
man in relation to all things was the rise of the social 
sciences ; the perception that social problems are often 
perhaps insoluble, that at any rate there is no panacea. 
And fiction, partly anticipating and partly following 
the tendency visible everywhere else, acquired this 
open-mindedness, became impersonal and disinterested 
to the last degree. 

Both sentimentalism and satire are very comfortable 
postures in an orthodox universe, governed by divine 
law and dedicated to some ultimate enforcement of 
order. The sentimentalist feels that everything is al- 
ready settled without his connivance, and that he may 
as well enjoy what appeals to him ; the satirist thinks 
he knows just how everything is settled, and, under- 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 161 

standing the law, can do no less than lay it down. 
But either attitude seems childish when the decay of 
faith turns the universe into an overwhelming riddle, 
its truths into antiquated speculations, its fixed moral 
laws into mere truisms about animal behaviour. The 
mature man then is he who senses the relative, pro- 
visional, and impermanent status of all that is thought 
or known — the man without prejudices. Our realist 
escapes all prejudices by respecting all opinions, and 
rejecting all. He has the open inquiring mind, the 
steeled heart. He believes in everything as an evi- 
dence, but in nothing as a proof. His mind is a 
sympathetic and submissive recording instrument for 
the actual; for every experience, thought, memory, 
impression, or dream. He sympathizes with all, be- 
cause his philosophical conscience tells him that 
whatever exists is worthy of sympathetic understand- 
ing. In short, his unremitting effort is to get outside 
himself, his own likes and dislikes, and finally to get 
outside the world, outside everything. For it is only 
from that impersonal point of vantage, he tells him- 
self, that it is possible to see through everything. 
Likes and dislikes become relatively meaningless in a 
world conceived as an evolutionary unit, in which we 
are all necessarily parts of each other. 



II 



This new mood that has come over the practice of 
fiction can be summarized as a selfless and pervasive 



162 THE MODERN NOVEL 

curiosity. The old hatreds have passed, irrecover- 
ably, it would seem. Even so vigorous a fighting man 
as Huxley, defending himself from the charge of 
having gone out of his way to assail things commonly 
held sacred, says: "I . . . steadfastly deny that 
* hatred of Christianity ' is a feeling with which I have 
any acquaintance. There are very few things which 
I find it permissible to hate; and though, it may be, 
that some of the organizations, which arrogate to them- 
selves the Christian name, have richly earned a place 
in the category of hateful things, that ought to have 
nothing to do with one's estimation of the religion, 
which they have perverted and disfigured out of all 
likeness to the original. ' ' x Thus, in the chief con- 
troversialist of his age, a scientific impartiality takes 
the place of bias; and presently that mood of the 
laboratory, the mood of research, has conquered the 
novel and annexed it as an invaluable province. 

When we look for illustrations through fiction of 
the last twenty years, we do not have to go unre- 
warded. If we examine the only literary career since 
George Eliot's that can compare in length, in dignity, 
and in originality with the careers of Hardy and 
Meredith, — that of Henry James, — we shall find it 
animated from the earliest years by this very impulse 
of curiosity. Henry James won his first distinction as 
a student of international situations, with special ref- 
erence to the American abroad ; and of all the writers 
in his generation who dealt with such themes, he alone 

i Science and Christian Tradition, p. vii. New York: D. 
Appleton and Co., 1894. 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 163 

portrayed Americans and Europeans who were wise 
enough to learn much from each other, too wise to try 
to teach each other anything. He creates the best 
elements discoverable in modern characters who are 
products of quite separate places and traditions of 
breeding, and then simply throws those contrasting ele- 
ments together in crucial situations to see what will 
happen. He takes his spoil, his trophy, and gives 
us our reward, not in the triumph of one set of char- 
acters or interests over another, but simply in the tri- 
umph of understanding all round. And, late in his 
life when his work of fiction was almost over and he 
sat down to make the Prefaces to the definitive New 
York edition of it, — a series of the most valuable docu- 
ments ever produced in constructive criticism of fic- 
tion as an art, — his constant emphasis was upon the 
unflagging ingenuity and patience with which he had 
drawn his clues from life and extricated them 
from the mass of interfering attendant circum- 
stances. The exertion of selfless curiosity is to him a 
good in itself; curiosity is the only one of his emo- 
tions to which the baffling element in life makes any 
challenge worth accepting; a problematical character 
or situation is an importunate plea addressed to his 
intuition; and in him this essentially modern disin- 
terested emotion of curiosity enlarges its scope until it 
includes compassion, chivalry, self-renunciation, the 
uttermost extension of delicacy, and what Professor 
"Wendell has called, in a fine commemorative tribute, 
his "exquisite solicitude." Henry James made of 
curiosity nothing less than a whole philosophy of art 



164 THE MODERN NOVEL 

and life. The emotion extends its scope from Roder- 
ick Hudson and The American, books of his first fame, 
to The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, his 
crowning attempts to tell ''the story that cannot be 
told." And The Sacred Fount, the one novel into 
which he deliberately put a partial portrait of himself, 
is nothing more than a dramatization of enlightened 
curiosity, of a sort of sublimated appetite for benevo- 
lent gossip, at work in a tangled social situation where 
all the clues are not material but spiritual and intui- 
tional. 

This spirit of curiosity, as exhibited quintessentially 
in the novels and tales of Henry James, strangely ful- 
fils the. commandment to love one 's neighbour as one 's 
self ;(the realist's effort is precisely to get outside him- 
self and inside his neighbour, to see others as they see 
themselves.; This self -suppression is conceived, not as 
a moral duty, but as an intellectual privilege ; but the 
result is largely the same. Why blame things for be- 
ing what they are, when everything is what it cannot 
help being? "To understand is to forgive." Mr. 
John Galsworthy expresses the modern spirit, in one 
of his brave if slightly discouraged sketches, The Inn 
of Tranquillity,^ when he says that it is wrong for 
one of us to despise another, because "we are all little 
bits of continuity." "To despise one another is to 
deny continuity; and to deny continuity is to deny 
eternity." Each of us is only a drop in the same 
ocean of being. And Mr. Joseph Conrad, who is 

i The Inn of Tranquillity. By John Galsworthy. New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 165 

hardly less illuminating in discussion of his art than in 
the practice of it, says in a memorable passage : " . . . 
the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of 
the living universe reflected in our consciousness may 
be our appointed task on this earth. " 1 " The de- 
tached curiosity of a subtle mind ' ' is the faculty which 
he dramatizes in Chance — in fact, in all the stories re- 
lated by Marlow — and his whole philosophy is implied 
in the statement that "Resignation, not mystic, not 
detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and 
informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for 
which it is impossible to become a sham.' , 

It would be easy to find plenty of other testimony to 
this same effect, but none more authoritative than that 
of these three artists who happen also to be critics of 
their art. Impersonal curiosity, in that ultimate de- 
velopment where it becomes almost a synonym of 
Christian charity, has entered the novel to the exclu- 
sion of the old prides, prejudices, and hates ; and it is 
impossible for us to imagine what can ever drive it out 
again. Science has created a new world and de- 
stroyed the old world behind us; we cannot, if we 
would, retreat into that old world of fixed standards 
where we were commanded to love some things and 
hate others. Our generation has seen the literature of 
sentimentalism become more "unofficial" than ever, 
and sink its appeal to the lowest intelligences. Mean- 
while, the literature of satire has descended to mere 
muck-raking. The falling to pieces of these tradi- 

1 A Personal Record, p. 151. New York: Harper & Bros. 
MCMXII. 



166 THE MODERN NOVEL 

tional extremes and the emergence between them of 
the present official literature of curiosity, of investiga- 
tion under the realistic spirit, constitute the final evi- 
dence of the change that has come over things, and 
of its general irrevocableness. 



Ill 



So far I find myself sufficiently occupied with 
merely describing and reporting the tendency which 
I have called by this name of the realistic spirit. But 
to describe is not necessarily to approve; nor do I 
mean to let the discussion become wholly uncritical. 
The realistic tendency may be inevitable, yet at the 
same time deplorable ; and if we, necessarily the chil- 
dren of our time, see inherent weaknesses and short- 
comings in the mood that rules us, we must not be 
afraid to state them squarely, and to ask, in a spirit 
of fearless comparison, where that mood is likely to 
bring us out. 

Any one can see, I think, that the realistic spirit is 
not without its defects and dangers, and that the first 
among these is the danger of losing the sense of criti- 
cism of life. That fiction, to deserve its place, must 
be in some sense a critical test of values in reality, in 
character and in conduct, I must hold as a first postu- 
late. Fiction is criticism when it takes sides, as satire 
does ; fiction is criticism when it fearlessly and impar- 
tially investigates the nature of life and society, as 
modern realism does. But the spirit which makes 






THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 167 

everything in the world seem worth investigation, this 
indefatigable modern curiosity, may result in the sub- 
stitution of a lesser faculty for interpretative criti- 
cism — the lesser faculty, I mean, which contents itself 
with reporting the existence and the unnumbered as- 
pects of reality, quite forgetting the while that the 
tremendous question is what we want, what we need. 
The patient scrutiny of everything in the field of 
vision may result at length in a curious optical de- 
fect; not exactly a blurring of the sight, for our re- 
alist is nearly always a clear-eyed person, but a loss 
of proportion and perspective. In short, he who is 
interested in everything and intolerant of nothing 
tends to become equally interested in everything; to 
make actuality, and not worth, his test of values. 
Some of us, if we read critically, think we have lately 
seen the love of reality for its own sake pushed to 
that excess where it defeats the meaning of reality. 
One can see a crowd only by being out of it ; and one 
can evaluate the masses of facts in a novel only when 
one knows through what philosophical window one 
is looking at them. The ' ' documenting, ' ' note-taking, 
data-gathering novelist who says to us simply: 
1 ' These things are so, my word for it : make what you 
choose of them, ' ' is giving us no philosophical window 
through which to see his crowd; and if our critical 
sense is numbed and the spectacle becomes for us a 
meaningless pageant of the real, that outcome is hardly 
to be wondered at. 

This loss of criticism is the destiny which has ob- 
viously overtaken some of the current reputations de- 



168 THE MODERN NOVEL 

rived simply from an enormous industry in observ- 
ing, an enormous skill in reporting. And I see a con- 
sequence of this loss, a consequence as natural as it 
is lamentable, in the relative disappearance from fic- 
tion of great and likable characters, and the substi- 
tution of weak, unreal, and tawdry characters. Ed- 
itors of literary columns have developed a habit of 
reminding us that British fiction for several decades 
past has created only three or four characters who 
are welcomed into the common stock available for 
popular allusion — say, Hardy's Tess, Kipling's Mul- 
vaney, and Sherlock Holmes. I am far from sure 
that this is an intelligent selection, depending as it 
does on the mere counting of heads over a very short 
period of time; but the prevalence of the elegiac tone 
in present editorial comments on the characters of 
fiction is at least evidence that the novel has lost some 
power in what ought to be its chief province. There 
is no predicting an illustrious or even a safe future 
for the novel if it is losing the art of criticism 
through the positive and unmistakable bestness of its 
persona?. 

I am not forgetting that I previously claimed 
for the novelist his privilege of treating human 
weakness and degeneration; but to yield any palpa- 
ble reward the weakness he treats should be the 
weakness of the strong, and the character who de- 
generates should not be a degenerate character. Let 
us by all odds have intellectual analysis; but first of 
all let us have something worth analysing. Too often 
of late fiction has lost its sense of differences, and has 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 169 

not only treated persons who are infirm, morbid, or 
vicious, but has treated them as though they were ad- 
mirable and lovable. The novelist has become so ob- 
sessed by the vision of our common humanity that he 
has lost sight of all those differences and superiorities 
which alone make humanity deserve consideration in 
art. The biologist in the laboratory may get as much 
out of a polyp as out of a monkey ; but the novelist 
cannot get as much out of a monkey as out of a man. 
The difference is that the scientist is working, in each 
experiment, for all time, adding grain of sand to grain 
of sand in his task of building out the shore of 
knowledge into the sea of ignorance; whereas the 
novelist is working in terms of books which are them- 
selves complete wholes, and must separately stand or 
be swept away. The ideal of research, without reward 
in the present, is not for him ; every time he signs his 
name he must have given us something positive, or we 
find no meaning in his work. Let him recognize the 
temporary and limited conditions of his craft, and 
remember that fiction, under whatever philosophy or 
lack of philosophy, is truly constructive only so long 
as it criticizes life through great persons, ideals made 
flesh. We have seen, I think, that the realistic equa- 
nimity is on the whole less likely to create great char- 
acters than was the older philosophy which found 
room for intense predilections and fierce aversions. 

IV 

■ 
The only intelligible reason for criticism is to get 

things improved or somehow changed ;, and behind my 



170 THE MODERN NOVEL 

general assumption that literature is criticism of life 
is an implication that literature has something to do 
with making life better. I raised a moment ago, and 
now raise again, the question of what we modern 
people want. I suppose that, being modern people, 
we want, as Mr. Galsworthy does, more of the feeling 
of continuity — the sense of universal human kinship 
as we look upon our fellow men and their affairs, the 
sense of cosmic unity as we contemplate the whole of 
nature. Mr. Galsworthy has said that, to gain the 
feeling of continuity, we must deny ourselves con- 
tempt, which is the destruction of continuity. Well, 
then, we must rejoice at whatever tends to lessen the 
number of things which evoke contempt from the 
natural human heart — for it remains wholly improb- 
able that the human heart can ever be reconstituted 
through the intellect. Contempt grows by what it 
finds to feed on; and the one chance of purging the 
soul of hate seems to be through destroying hateful 
things — intolerance, for example — and making a bet- 
ter world. And to destroy hateful things, it is prob- 
ably necessary to hate them, or at least to see that 
they are hateful. 

Now, here we come to still another implied weak- 
ness in the realistic spirit, if it be true that that 
spirit means loss of the critical sense. The realist 
would destroy hateful things by persuading himself 
that they are not hateful. He does not want to de- 
stroy ugliness in order to beautify the world ; he wants 
to teach the soul to find beauty even in ugliness, in 
order to beautify the soul. And, however little we 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 171 

may like to admit it, we must see that this surrender 
of standards and aversions is essentially weak, sterile, 
and static; at least it is and must be so over any 
stretch of social history that we can comprehend in 
one glimpse. Our coldly intellectual and serene mod- 
ern charity simply does not and cannot get anything 
done. It is the fiction of satire which has brought 
things to pass. Why, even the "unofficial sentimen- 
talism, ' ' with all its ignorance and bias, has done more 
than impartial realism — witness Uncle Tom's Cabin 
and All Sorts and Conditions of Men. 

The truth seems to be that only violent likes and dis- 
likes are really dynamic. It may be disheartening, 
but it is certainly probable, that animal matter reacts 
most readily and decisively to antipathies pointed with 
scorn. So it has been, and is, in politics and re- 
ligion: we do well to entertain the thought that it 
may be so in literature. It may be one of the strange 
ironies of evolution that modern man, swayed by a 
passion to get things done, has grown up to an in- 
tellectual contempt for the only possible means of 
getting anything done. Having the desire, we de- 
spise the means — and then try to hide our impotence 
by belittling the desire. These may be the facts ; and 
from this point of view the extreme development of 
the impersonal outlook may be our modern nemesis — 
the tragedy of indifferentism. 

Two of the three modern artists named a moment 
ago furnish some evidence of the lack of dynamic 
force in the modern gospel. Mr. Conrad is put to 
some pains to explain that his resignation is not in- 



172 THE MODERN NOVEL 

difference; that he wills "what the gods will"' just as 
fervently as though he were in the secret of what 
their will is. And Henry James was frequently 
charged — very authoritatively by Mr. W. C. Brown - 
ell, 1 for example — with having no interest whatever 
in his characters except as specimens, or in life except 
as a quarry wherein to dig specimens. Nostromo and 
Under Western Eyes are not indifferent; nor is The 
Golden Bowl aridly aesthetic. But the modern de- 
tachment which is so patently necessary to these nov- 
els has too much the effect of making both writers 
over to a very specialized part of the public. 

Still more interesting is the test which the scientific 
posture received in the career of George Gissing, the 
first British novelist of considerable eminence to turn 
fiction into sociology. Gissing wrote about cities, 
slums, socialism, conditions of labour, the problem of 
illegitimacy, economic independence for women, the 
education of the poor, and a host of other such mat- 
ters, and wrote about them from first-hand knowl- 
edge gained through the enforced privations of his 
own thwarted life. Gissing wrote about these themes, 
not because he had them at heart, and certainly not 
because he loved or believed in the folk whom these 
themes embraced, but because the facts were there 
and he knew them. Himself by instinct a classicist 
and something of a hedonist, both sensitive to beauty 
and aloof from the democratic instincts and ideals, 
he portrayed the sordid surroundings into which ac- 

1 Essay on Henry James, in American Prose Masters. By 
W. C. Brownell. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1909. 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 173 

cident had forced him, and wrote one novel after an- 
other, in all conscience to be sure, but without love 
and without hope, saying again and again, in effect, 
"I show you things that are." His pseudo-biogra- 
pher says: "The essence of his best work was that 
it was founded on deep and accurate knowledge and 
keen observation. Its power lay in a bent, in a mood 
of mind, not by any means in any subject, even 
though his satiric discussion of what he called the 
' ignobly decent' showed his strength, and indirectly 
his inner character. His very repugnance to his 
early subjects led him to choose them." 1 

Gissing is a disciple, almost an apostle, of the 
realistic spirit. Mr. Chesterton, in his life of Dickens, 
draws the obvious comparison between the effect of 
the underworld as Dickens coloured it with his own 
fierce hates and loves, and the effect of that same 
underworld as Gissing portrayed it with a resignation 
akin to despair. Gissing was a brave enough man to 
"look on with undimmed eyes," but not a brave 
enough man to hope against hope. He was much too 
scientific for that. And the result is that his children 
of apathy and of futility hardly move us at all, hardly 
stir the heart to those impulses of compassion which 
result in disinterested action; whereas the poor of 
Dickens's London are a perpetual delight and a per- 
petual lesson in brotherhood. It is Mr. Chesterton's 
view that we long to be succouring brothers to Dick- 
ens's poor precisely because they do not need us so 

1 The Private Life of Henry Maitland, A Record Dictated by 
J. H. Revised and edited by Morley Roberts, New York: 
George H. Doran Co. 1912 P. 300. 



174 THE MODERN NOVEL 

much as we need them ; whereas we are left cold and 
benumbed by Gissing's outcasts because their need 
is so much greater than our capacity to give. In the 
unscientific optimism of Dickens, the difference be- 
tween joy and despair turns on a smile or a joke; in 
the scientific pessimism of Gissing, there is nothing 
that can make any difference. That very impartiality 
chills us, atrophies the will, and dries at their source 
the springs of pity. Hardly any parallel could show 
more succinctly the penalty which fiction has to pay 
for intellectual poise, when that poise is so sustained 
as to resemble indifference. 



I am aware that there are many readers, and some 
critics, to whom it is offensive to think of fiction as 
having any such function as I have here ascribed to 
it, and who see in any insistence that fiction ought to 
direct the will and inspire it nothing more than a 
plea for crass cloddish didacticism. Nor do I recede 
by a step from my own position in relation to didacti- 
cism. I maintain, as before, that fiction must be dis- 
interested in the sense of telling valuable truth, let 
what will come of it, and that a novel which stands 
or falls by a special plea for or against something is 
incurably weak-kneed. But this is not to say that a 
novel is bad because it rouses a burning moral in- 
dignation against things which are unquestionably 
wrong, or a moral passion for things which are un- 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 175 

questionably right. If any member of "the ineffable 
company of pure aesthetes" condemns Nicholas Nick- 
leby because it had a reformatory effect on English 
private schools, or against Hard Cash because it 
called attention to the need for reform in English 
private asylums for the insane, he is a person for 
whom one is not obliged to throw away one's own 
conscience. /It is something to the credit of the 
novel if it can show why vice is vicious, and do justice 
to the virtue of vicious characters ; but I do not think 
this achievement is comparable to that of the novel 
which fortifies our instinct to place virtue above vice, 
kindness above cruelty, and discipline above lawless- 
ness. I And if realism must go on seeing primarily the 
sameness in things and persons, to the exclusion of 
the invaluable differences, then it were a thousand 
times better to make the best of the old determined 
and inflexible dogmas of satire at its most dogmatic. 
But all this is in criticism of the realistic spirit as 
it most commonly is, not as it might be. I have 
named some of the defects and dangers which realism 
is heir to, and of which we have seen it the frequent 
victim during the past two decades. But there is 
nothing in the nature of realism that need commit it 
irrevocably to a deadening resignation, lack of a criti- 
cal interpretation of things, and weak or insignificant 
characters. Interest in all sides of life is in itself a 
great good; the attempt to interpret all persons as 
they seem to themselves, and to bring all reality within 
the radiated warmth of the social emotions of sym- 
pathy and compassion, that too is in itself a great 



176 THE MODERN NOVEL 

good. The man who is interested in everything does 
not have to part with his scale of values ; great genius 
can go into the murky places of life without living 
there perpetually, and without forgetting that they 
are murky. And when the realistic spirit produces 
its great individual genius, we shall see the great 
character once more crowned in fiction ; for the crea- 
tion of great characters, more than any other aspect 
of fiction, is the function of original genius, and has 
next to nothing to do with an author's philosophy. 
Meredith's doctrine of comedy may be a product of 
Meredith's social philosophy, but Meredith's Roy Rich- 
mond is the product simply of Meredith. And when 
fiction has another Meredith it will have other Roy 
Richmonds, other Sandras and Dianas and Clara 
Middletons — and it will have them just the same, 
though their creator be a theosophist or a Mormon. 

It was not my intention then to prove that realism 
can never escape the difficulties which beset even 
realists so great as Henry James and Conrad. It is 
well to state roundly and emphatically the case against 
realism, and to name the worst possible eventuality. 
But the temptations of realism are not necessarily its 
downfall — and besides, there remains the important 
question whether the realistic spirit has not inhereut 
potentialities which belong to the creative impulse 
in no other form. 

This question I can answer in but one way. The 
realist does have, in his feeling of harmony with the 
world-purpose, his sense of oneness with all creation, 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 177 

a solid philosophical and emotional 'foundation for his 
art. And it is a sort of foundation which, because 
it implies a naturalistic and self -perpetuating world, 
leaves the artist most free for those facts and phases 
of reality which mean most in art; that is, he 
has no longer to be the conscious servant or the un- 
conscious slave of a preordained and everlasting law, 
and all his care may be for the artist 's proper task, to 
present the immediate and tangible as it is in itself 
and for his temperament. 

Moreover — and this second consideration is still 
more important — the naturalistic world confers upon 
the artist the dignity of some added importance. In 
the world of orthodox conception, the whole was un- 
changeable whatever became of the parts; the great 
facts of destiny were established once for all. In the 
world of naturalism, it was manifest that whatever 
came to pass must come through man 's own efforts ; if 
he wanted a better world, he must make it. The decay 
of faith means the rise of the social sciences. The fa- 
therhood of God meant that no one of us was his 
brother's keeper; but the brotherhood of man makes 
each of us the keeper of all. And the novelist has felt 
this new responsibility. He has turned from excep- 
tional and unique individuals to the laws of society, 
the individual in his relation to his age and his group, 
the intricate problems of our common welfare. 
Something of this is what Meredith means when he 
says that "all right use of life ... is to pave ways 
for the firmer footing of those who succeed us," and 



178 THE MODERN NOVEL 

that ' ' the novel, exposing and illustrating the natural 
history of man, may help us to such sustaining road- 
side gifts." 

Something must indeed come of so much striving 
and groping and piercing of the veils of the elder 
reticence. It is unthinkable that all this conscience, 
this selfless and unwearying devotion to truth, should 
come to naught. The means may be slow, but the end 
may also be sure. Perhaps the imperceptible increase 
in understanding, in appreciation of what life is and 
calls for, may result in great and sweeping changes, 
in which fiction shall have played its creditable part. 
So changes do come about: so came, for example, a 
long sequence of developments in the social history 
of woman, in which perhaps the novel has not been 
entirely negligible. The realistic spirit has done 
more than any of its ancestors for the diffusion of 
high merit throughout fiction; even without the re- 
currence of first-rate individual genius, the novel is 
a more natural instrument for the propagation of ideas 
than it has ever been, simply because it has put so 
many skilled pens to work. 

"We shall know more about the realistic spirit at the 
end of another decade; for, as a world-spirit in the 
broadest sense, and not merely as an agency in art, it 
is now going through its ordeal by fire. In the 
warring countries we see it becoming an intellectual 
majority in such men as Romain Rolland and Ber- 
trand Russell, the seers of a new and greater interna- 
tionalism, even now called upon to bear great bur- 
dens of hatred, and bear them with equanimity and 



THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 179 

self-possession When the curtain of smoke rises 
from the battlefields of this war, will such men have 
shown the road that leads away from the hatreds of 
the past? or will the thing that has proved itself 
strong enough to conquer art be, for some generations 
yet, too weak to conquer the lives of nations and 
enforce a new gospel of goodwill through the sense of 
brotherhood ? 



VII 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 



In speaking of tragedy and comedy as elements 
which have something to do with the purpose and 
meaning of the novel, and which play a part in its 
evolution, I am going to assume the common distinc- 
tions and differences of elementary definition. Any 
piece of fiction, we know to begin with, is a record 
of struggle between opposed forces — the more nearly 
equal the forces, the more intense the struggle, and 
therefore the more appropriate for treatment in a 
work of art. The struggle may take place on 
a high moral plane or a low physical plane; be- 
tween separate persons or sets of persons, or be- 
tween different elements in the same person; with 
or without the motive of hatred; in fact, either 
consciously or unconsciously. But some sort of 
struggle there must be. And we call the result 
tragedy if the forces with which we sympathize are 
defeated, comedy if those forces triumph. Tragedy 
is essentially disaster to the deserving, comedy essen- 
tially the reward of the deserving, whether through the 
fulfilment of their desires or otherwise. Tragedy, to 
be completely successful, must make a strong appeal to 
the emotions of fear and sorrow. But the converse is 
not true: comedy need not be comic in the sense of 
moving one to laughter. 

183 



184 THE MODERN NOVEL 

In some such way as this we may state the simplest 
set of postulates that makes any adequate intellectual 
(distinction between these two types of composition. 
But once we have laid down the set of postulates and 
got the distinction made, we are instantly struck by 
the fact that the conventions which distinguish abso- 
lute comedy from absolute tragedy have never been 
so marked in the novel, or so important, as they have 
in the play. The novel, we know, learned its tech- 
nique from the drama; the principal Elizabethan 
novels are the work of men who were, with the ex- 
ception of Lyly, dramatists primarily; and Fielding, 
who learned a great deal of fictional style and struc- 
ture from Cervantes, and helped make the novel epic, 
learned perhaps still more from his long and prolific 
apprenticeship to dramaturgy, and may be said to 
have made the novel dramatically epic. Yet it is 
true that most great plays up to 1800 are quite 
squarely either tragedies or comedies, whereas most 
great novels of the same period tend to be not so 
definitively either one or the other. Or if this is an 
overstatement of the fact, at least it is true that there 
are more exceptions to the technical difference in 
fiction than in drama. And after 1837 the sharpness 
of the distinction quite disappears from the novel; 
plays, what plays there are, remain one thing or the 
other, but novels tend to become a mingling of both. 
"Why is it, one is prompted to ask, that the novel, 
which learned its rudiments from the play, should 
have gone farther than the play toward abolishing 
the hard-and-fast distinctions? Why especially 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 185 

should there have been so few pure tragedies in fic- 
tion? 

I find a tentative answer to the second of these 
questions in the fact that the novelist's audience al- 
most necessarily consists of one person at a time, or at 
least of one person in a place, whereas the dramatist's 
audience consists of many persons simultaneously in 
one place. The physical process of novel-reading is 
solitary; that of enjoying a play is social. And it 
seems on the whole to be true that, although every ex- 
treme of emotion is intensified when we share it, so that 
all emotion is potentially socializing, still we can bear 
to laugh in solitude more easily than to cry in solitude. 
We can feel happy alone; but when we sorrow, we 
instinctively crave the support of a whole social 
fabric made up of sorrow, of which our grief is only 
one thread. It is quite possible that if novels were 
habitually enjoyed as works to be read aloud to vast 
numbers of hearers, they might have a quite different 
emotional tradition. It may be so; the conjecture 
is at least of some passing interest. 

But this is only a tentative explanation of some 
things in the past ; it is certainly inadequate to explain 
the breaking down of the distinction between tragedy 
and comedy in modern drama itself. I think perhaps 
the habit of reading in solitude did produce originally 
the well-recognized demand for " happy endings" in 
stories; but that explanation certainly cannot reach 
beyond the date at which the drama begins to choose 
other endings than the flatly tragic and flatly comic. 
Nor do I think this phenomenon in the drama results 



186 THE MODERN NOVEL 

from the fact that the drama, after a long period of 
insignificance, begins for the first time to learn from 
the novel, thus reversing the former process. 

No: the disappearance of tragedy and comedy in 
their pure state, both on and off the stage, is a symp- 
tom of some larger tendency at work in everything — 
in life as well as art. If the question were of art 
alone, we might conjecture that the novel, as the 
longer and more leisured of the two forms, is auto- 
matically freer to present the mingled good and evil, 
sadness and joy, of life; and that the play, as the 
more compact and selective form, has to go farther 
toward artificial exclusion and emotional unity. But, 
as I say, all such explanations show themselves inade- 
quate when drama begins to follow the same tendency. 
The fact is, there is a general loss of emotional finality 
all through art; poetry and painting, as well as fic- 
tion and drama, try much less hard than formerly to 
produce the pure extremes of emotion, and much 
harder to produce the complex intermediate emotions. 
I have already pointed out that, generally speaking, 
emotion becomes proportionately less important in 
literature and intellectual analysis more important. 
The loss of pure tragedy and comedy is part of this 
tendency — for the deeper analysis goes, the less con- 
tent can it be with emotional finality of any sort ; the 
more it sees that any pretence of finality is counter 
to the nature of reality. 

The important point about both the tragic ending 
and the comic ending is that they are endings, full 
stops; whereas in life there is no "finis" at the foot 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 187 

of the page — even death is a full cadence for but one 
person, and all the interests and issues of which he 
was a part go on practically without interruption. 
Life is always re-creating itself out of the past, per- 
petuating the residua of old things in new shapes, 
and denying the beholder any sort of conclusiveness 
whatever. And art, if it is to suggest the nature of 
life so analysed, must attach less and less importance 
to beginnings and endings, more and more importance 
to what comes between them. Indeed, everything 
does come between them: the only real beginning is 
the beginning of the world, the only real ending is the 
end of time. Since the conditions under which the 
artist works prevent these from being "copy," he 
gets along with a segment cut out from somewhere 
between, and frankly recognizes that it is a segment, 
and not a whole. 



II 



Suppose we undertake first to look with some par- 
ticularity into the reasons for the disappearance of 
absolute tragedy in the novel. 

It is obvious that the analytic mood which I have 
called the realistic spirit is more interested in the 
reasons for human failure than in the mere fact of 
failure; for the realistic spirit is essentially the in- 
quiring spirit that wants to understand the nature 
and hidden significance of acts and their obscure con- 
sequences. Now, this fact imposes upon the realistic 
procedure, at the outset, a limitation which denies 



188 THE MODERN NOVEL 

the very nature of tragedy and comedy. Yon can 
give your undivided emotional sympathy to a person 
engaged in an effort to attain a certain object or 
ideal : you can joy in his success or sorrow in his fail- 
ure, as comedy and tragedy call upon you to do. But 
you cannot give your emotional sympathy, or any 
part of it, to a reason for anything. A reason is just 
something that is so; it has no more emotional im- 
plications in it than the binomial theorem. ( Fiction 
written in the scientific spirit, then, transfers the 
appeal very largely from the heart to the heady the 
emotional elements may be present, but the accent is 
not at all on their emotionality. Most of the emo- 
tions present in fiction of the last quarter century 
exist as facts to be understood, — that is, as experi- 
ences of the characters, — not as effects to be felt. 
This would remain true even if scientific fiction dealt 
in absolutely sharp beginnings and conclusive end- 
ings; the endings would still not be tragic or comic, 
because they would not be resorted to s f or the sake of 
making us feel deeply about them. Fiction parts 
company with tragedy and comedy just in so far as 
it transfers its province from feeling to thought. 

But of course modern realistic fiction does not keep 
the finality either, any more than it does the emotion. 
It cuts out its segment of life in such a way that as 
much as possible of the whole may be represented, 
and makes its intensive analysis of that segment for 
the sake of its bearing on the whole. It is hardly 
necessary to remind ourselves again that the realistic 
spirit is the outcome of seeing life as an organic and 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 189 

evolutionary unit, or that the modern sense of things 
is the sense of "living in the whole," as John Ad- 
dington Symonds finely phrased it. Now, it is ob- 
vious that there can be no tragedy for the whole. 
The novelists of an elder generation tried, often 
with immense success, to rouse the feeling that the 
world revolved for their few chosen men and women ; 
when the book was over, the world stopped. On lay- 
ing down the book, one walked about for hours in a 
daze, until life could assert itself and make things 
real again. One was made to feel temporarily that 
the fortunes of those few men and women were 
everything ; they were given to us for their own sake. 
No one experiences anything of that sensation on read- 
ing the characteristic modern novels. They fortify in 
us the feeling that life goes on just the same — the life 
of which the characters make a part, and for the sake 
of which they are called upon to exist. Whatever 
happens to them, nothing much happens to the world : 
it is the same world, except that, if the novelist has 
served us well in his own chosen way, we know it a 
little better. You cannot get the sense of complete 
tragedy out of a contemplation of lives presented as 
part of human society, whatever happens to those 
lives ; because society is safe, and beyond the reach of 
ultimate tragedy. Society is, to all human intents 
and purposes, immortal. 

Really, then, there can hardly be any such thing 
as a tragedy written from the modern point of view, 
with the emphasis on society, unless it is written by 
a pessimist. The pessimist, who sees the good in man 



190 THE MODERN NOVEL 

as mortal, the evil in the world as immortal, can 
represent the good as extinguished, decisively and 
irretrievably, by the evil, as Mr. Hardy does in his 
almost insupportable last novel, Jude the Obscure. 
But mark: even that is not quite bona fide tragedy: 
for authentic tragedy always tacitly appeals to 
our feeling that the triumph of evil over good is an 
abnormality, a monstrous perversion; it evokes a re- 
bellious grief. And pessimism makes that abnormal- 
ity normal, an expression of the world-principle as 
the pessimist interprets it; and the properly tragic 
emotion shrivels from rebellion to a numbed and help- 
less grief. Pessimism in modern art invariably de- 
feats itself, as a point of view available to art, by 
turning thus into morbidity. It gives us nothing of 
the equality which is essential to the tragic struggle; 
the disaster is predestined. 

On the whole the modern spirit, except when pessi- 
mistic, is much too broadly analytical to see any in- 
dividual human failure as unrelieved and hopeless, or 
any evil without its interpenetration of good. And 
most of the characters who fail in modern fiction 
achieve in doing so some kind of success which out- 
weighs the failure — if not for themselves, then for 
others. The best modern novels follow Dr. Johnson's 
philosophy of the vanity of human wishes: we may 
not get out of life exactly what we are trying for, 
and we certainly do not get what we first began by 
wishing, but we may get something potentially worth 
much more. Silas Lapham, the pivotal character of 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 191 

the great American novel (which, like many things 
we are always anticipating, is to be sought in the 
past), fails in his business, sees his new house burn 
down, and knows that his own short-sighted folly is 
chargeable with the whole sum of disaster; he is a 
broken and disappointed man, who will never be 
whole again. But at the same time he has recovered 
the faith of his wife, the love of his daughters, and a 
kind of self-respect which he had begun to lose in the 
intricate chicaneries of high finance ; and Mr. Howells 
shows him to us at the last making the best of being 
on simplified terms with life and with himself — at 
least knowing his own heart as he had not done, and 
willing to believe that "nothing can be thrown quite 
away ; and it can 't be that our sins only weaken us. ' ' 
The partial success brought out by the partial fail- 
ure, the moral or spiritual gain wrested from the ma- 
terial or physical loss — this is the objective of most 
modern fiction that is worth discussing. No disaster 
is complete so long as there is this to be got out of it. 
"Living in the whole" and seeing the remoter im- 
plications of one's acts means that failures in them- 
selves desperate and, by the older philosophy, irre- 
trievable are to be read as prefaces to hope — the 
travail of our collective life as it struggles to bring 
forth some community of good, or the growing pains 
of rebellious youth in its slow and painful discovery 
of what life is. 



192 THE MODERN NOVEL 

i — 



III 



The conventions of comedy have remained on the 
whole stronger in the novel than those of tragedy, 
just as comedies have remained more numerous than 
tragedies; but those conventions too have declined as 
the sense of finality weakened in our contemplation of 
life, and they may be said now to have vanished al- 
together. The Victorian novel tended to conclude, as 
Professor Winchester has put it, with ' ' sugared mari- 
tal felicity, with 'God bless you, my children,' and 
ten thousand a year ' ' -, 1 but more and more there grew 
upon the novelist a perception that life is disillusion, 
and books like David Copperfield and Bleak House, 
Vanity Fair and Pendennis show us in the last chap- 
ter persons who have both gained and lost something 
as they tried to cope with life; persons who have 
known defeat and futility, who have renounced and 
outgrown, and who can see that life has been on the 
whole good. But the comedy of manners does cling 
until astonishingly late to its pretence that the story 
is all told when the last page is turned. The end of 
the book is the end of the character. 

Partly, of course, this effect is produced by the 
old convention that success in love, crudely denoted 
by an engagement ring or a marriage license, is the 
triumphal apex of any life, and that after the hero 
has ''won" the heroine their careers cease to be of 
interest. /This convention has pretty well disap- 

i Some Principles of Literary Criticism, p. 299. By C. T. 
Winchester. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1899. 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 193 

peared now; success in getting married no longer is 
assumed to mean success in marriage; and success in 
marriage is our modern definition of success in love. 
The disappearance of this romantic illusion about 
love has been exceedingly good for fiction in one way : 
it has increased the age, hence the maturity, hence 
the interest, of the characters, and by so doing has 
made its picture of life less overbalanced by the 
sentimental/ But, as I say, the convention of the 
sentimental ending, with its absolute finality, did 
persist surprisingly long; and to this day one can 
find new novels in which the last two pages line all the 
characters up, just before the ultimate curtain falls, 
in a neat semi-circle across the stage, each ready with 
a tabloid version of his whole future life before he 
takes his leave of the reader with a bow. So long as 
the novel kept to this meticulous habit of accounting 
for everybody and all his relations, and exhausting 
the subject of what happened to whom, the charac- 
ters necessarily assumed the relation of entertainers, 
not that of fellow-men. Any one can see the superi- 
ority, if only on grounds of verisimilitude, of the 
custom which lets a character, when he has served his 
purpose to the story, simply drop out of it, as persons 
drop out of our lives; and which allows us to leave 
the major personages as folk who may still live on and 
go about their business — folk whom, for all we know 
to the contrary, we may meet again somewhere, as we 
so often meet the characters of Trollope. 

Whatever the persistence of the comic conventions, 
one can see, I think, that they are gradually forced 



194 THE MODERN NOVEL 

downward into the popular sentimentalism, out of 
artistically conscientious fiction; for the same set of 
logical considerations which applies to tragedy governs 
comedy as well, and the realistic view of life is the 
death of either. If life is a mingled affair of profit 
and loss, why should its counterfeit presentment strike 
a balance all on one side of the ledger ? The form of 
comedy is too symmetrical, too neat in its efficient 
disposal of everything, to mirror that life in which 
nothing is independently so, in which all things are 
interdependent. The democratic feeling of solidarity, 
the vision of a common destiny and an indefeasible 
community of interest, forbids us lightly to compute 
reality in terms of individual successes. The same 
logic which refuses to see anything as absolute failure 
in relation to the whole, refuses to see anything as 
absolute success. And as life intensifies and rein- 
forces in us, through experience and observation, the 
sense of its own inconclusiveness, comedy tends to de- 
generate into pure farce, which, having little or no 
representative value, may be dismissed as purely 
decorative, and therefore as having nothing to do with 
this discussion of purposes and meanings. 

On the whole, I think we may say that the hope of 
a school of really sufficient modern comedy is so 
fantastically remote as to rank among the impossibili- 
ties. For only one thinkable condition of things could 
produce such a comedy: a practically perfect society, 
such as Meredith foresaw. In such a society, there 
would be no loss and no waste ; the good of one would 
be the good of all, and every defeat of something by 






TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 195 

something else would be equally a victory for both. 
Of such community of interest, we have now only the 
vision. The crucial happenings take the form of 
contests between things and interests so different that 
every gain somewhere means loss somewhere else, — 
contests of class, of race, of power, — and in all these 
there is at least an undercurrent of the tragic. This 
the modern observer of life must feel and see, if he is 
truly to communicate anything to us. Not for him, 
not for us ever again, perhaps, the old artificial sim- 
plifications of unmitigated tragedy and comedy. 



IV 



The new fashion in endings makes all fiction stop, 
as the short story is recommended to begin, in medias 
res. To appreciate the difference of fashions through 
one of its trivial manifestations, compare the clos- 
ing paragraphs of half a dozen novels by Dickens 
with those of half a dozen by Mr. Hardy. And 
the point, small though it is when taken by itself, 
is indicative of the real change which has come over 
the artist's attitude toward life. " Begin at the be- 
ginning, set everything in order, and end when you 
are through " — thus the old rationale of composition, 
a sacrosanct formula. But the modern artist de- 
spairs of beginnings and endings; to him everything 
is middle; he is quite without the sense that every 
drama can be played up to the ultimate curtain, and 
that to stage it is an easy thing ; and this is the rea^ 



196 THE MODERN NOVEL 

son for his abandonment of the old conclusive end- 
ings which make tragedy and comedy, and for his 
adoption of the novel or play as being, in the words 
of an overworked phrase, a "slice of life." 

Now, it is a very simple affair to say that a piece 
of fiction should be a piece of life, and that it should 
pretend to no completeness which life does not pos- 
sess; but it is another and much more involved thing 
to make it fulfil these conditions. To begin with, 
it implies that impersonality in the contemplation of 
life can actually be carried to that pitch where the 
artist understands things as they are, absolutely with- 
out any personal bias for one kind of thing as against 
another, and without colouring anything with the 
tones of his own temperament. The realist's effort 
is, of course, to suppress himself and let life speak 
for itself; his technique is indeed objective. But, 
in this utter and abysmal philosophical sense, it is 
exceedingly doubtful whether there is any such thing 
as objectivity. Professor Warner Fite has some 
profitable remarks on this point: 

"As I prefer to put it, realism stands for denatured 
human experience. For without denying that some- 
thing is meant by an unvarnished fact, it strikes me 
that the phrase as it stands expresses a contradiction 
in terms. I may distinguish the fact as presented in 
your varnish from the fact as it appears to me, and 
thus, by allowing for your varnish and for mine, 
procure for the fact some measure of independence. 
But a fact without any varnish whatever seems to 
me, if facts are to be related to perception, to be no 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 197 

— — — ^— — — — — ^^— — — i 

fact at all ; and how the world is to be described from 
nobody's point of view, I cannot imagine. When I 
try to state facts in this fashion I find myself in dif- 
ficulty. The chair, for example, is the favourite 
philosophical illustration of a very solid fact. Yet 
when I attempt to describe the chair, I am confronted 
at once by arms, legs, seat, and back — terms that ex- 
press a human prejudice ; and when I try to dehuman- 
ize my description, I seem to find no terms that would 
make the chair recognizable, none that do not seem 
to transform a familiar human fact into something 
rather 'metaphysical.' 

"And if it be objected that my way of knowing, 
or of describing, the chair leaves the real chair un- 
touched, then I am compelled to wonder what that 
particular reality would be in a world that knew noth- 
ing of chairs — in a primitive world, for example, 
where every one squatted. Something real, I do not 
doubt ; yet still something intelligible, intelligible now 
from the standpoint of primitive life. If an automo- 
bile would cease to be an automobile in a world with- 
out carburetors, I cannot see how it could remain an 
automobile in a world without chauffeurs. When I 
try to conceive what that reality would be which is 
wholly unaltered by being known — to distinguish 
what the chair is in itself from what it becomes when 
known to be a chair, the cold fact from the humanly 
familiar and effective fact — I seem to find nothing 
but that metaphysical, atomic chair — the chair as 
varnished by the scientific point of view — which is 
not 'really' a chair and is only doubtfully known. 



198 THE MODERN NOVEL 

"It seems, then, that to be a realist is not so simple 
a task as it appears. We live in a world which we 
have surely not originated, a real and not a merely 
imaginary world; and, on the other hand, we live in 
a world which, just in being real, is more or less fa- 
miliar and (strangely) more or less responsive to 
our efforts, and which, in its familiarity and respon- 
siveness, reflects at every point our human point of 
view. In a word, the real world, for philosophy as 
well as for literature, is the fruit of a transaction 
between two parties; and a realism in which either 
of the parties is ignored is a mere pseudo-realism." 1 

So that when the artist looks at what he calls "the 
facts of life," he is looking at a congeries of facts 
as seen by him; and, having seen them at all, he can 
no more keep himself out of them than he can see the 
back of his own head without a mirror. The relations 
between and among them, those relations which are 
all-important to art, are the relations which he sees. 
We do well to keep these facts in mind when we talk 
about "pure" realism, absolute "objectivity." 

But if realism in this fundamental sense is impos- 
sible, it does not follow that it is impossible for the 
artist to try for it. As a matter of fact, the channel 
of fiction in the last thirty years is given a quite new 
turn by his persistent ingenuity in trying for it ; and 
in the process the novelist, unless he has the clearest 
notion of his own limitations as an observer of life, 
is especially subject to two dangers arising through 

i The Rejection of Consciousness, New York Nation, Vol. 
101, No. 2635, p. 773. 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 199 

the inability of mere observation to do what is asked 
of it. ^ 

To begin with, there is always the danger that a 
piece of art which purports to be a slice of life merely, 
will quite miss achieving a design in the artistic 
sense; will have no pattern except a single observer's 
experience. And that is assuredly not enough unity 
for the work of art ; otherwise, a stroll up Forty- 
Second Street in the crowded hours, if one kept one 's 
eyes open, would be a work of art. Many novels, and 
more and more plays, of the last two decades seem to 
work toward the ideal of replacing subject-matter by 
mere matter; the ideal of summing up life one fact 
after another, as science sums up the world of matter 
and force, instead of representing life by facts 
chosen for their representative value. And the re- 
sult is inevitably inartistic shapelessness. There can 
be no art without some form other than that arising 
from the mere juxtaposition of facts and events in 
real life ; because art is, almost by definition and cer- 
tainly by the nature of its appeal, a selecting and 
sifting process. 

But this is not so serious as one of its implications, 
the second danger of which I spoke. If art be with- 
out a pattern, and remain shapeless except in so far 
as it gives the artist's report of things which oc- 
curred together in factuality, then it will quite have 
failed to be a criticism of life; that is, to have any 
centre of purpose or meaning at all. It will be simply 
life beheld at one remove, and not illumined. The 
novelist will be supplying material which he himself 



200 THE MODERN NOVEL 

does not know how to interpret. If lie is baffled by 
his own copy, — we can hardly call it a creation, for 
the creator knows what his creatures exist for, — 
wherewithal shall we be enlightened? 

For these two reasons primarily, I am afraid we 
shall have to admit that the "slice-of-life" method 
is greater in its claims than in its fulfilment; espe- 
cially when we remind ourselves again that the novel- 
ist, whatever his intention, cannot possibly give us a 
story which is a slice of life and nothing else. The 
net result of this ideal is to suppress the elements of 
choice and accent which are the postulates of art, and 
to blur and perhaps defeat the purpose which the 
artist, by virtue of his being a conscious entity at all, 
cannot help having, even if he does not know that 
he has it. In undertaking to suppress his own philo- 
sophy, he undertakes what no one can perform; be- 
cause our philosophy is the window through which 
we have to see everything. Moreover, if he undertake 
to do that, he will deprive his work of what does most 
to justify its existence; for it is his province to re- 
create life in shapes which will show his considered 
interpretation of it. To say that he has no opinion, 
or that his opinion means nothing, is to confess mere 
disintegration and failure. 



Among the perplexities and dilemmas which attend 
realism, it is not altogether to be wondered at if the 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 201 

novelist flounders, uncertain of his way. It is easy 
enough to adjure him to have faith ; it is easy enough 
to point out to him that in the spiritual history of 
mankind faith has accomplished more than knowl- 
edge; it is easy enough to say that what we need is 
a renascence of the ''will to believe." And it is un- 
doubtedly true that there are many invaluable lessons 
for the modern practitioner of fiction in the sharply 
tragic or comic versions of life which make up the 
history of the novel. But every such plea fails to 
recognize the difficulty of the modern situation in its 
play on the modern mind. The modern mind knows 
too much to throw away what it knows merely in 
order to believe something that it would like to be- 
lieve. 

Moreover — and this is an incomparably more im- 
portant point — we are developing a temperament that 
loves reality, that finds it sufficient and swims and 
floats in it and is buoyed up by it as by faith. It 
seems to me unthinkable — though "unthinkable" is a 
very large word, and many unthinkable things have 
come to pass — that the modern artist can experience 
any change of heart or of mind which shall result in 
his picturing life as a thing that comes out even, with 
so much happiness dealt out there, and so much retri- 
bution here, to every man according to his desert. 
I do not see what hope we dare cherish of a future 
in which the outcome of things shall be determinate 
instead of indeterminate ; and until that future comes 
I do not see how we can ask the realist so far to 
abandon reality as to depict things as happening the 



202 THE MODERN NOVEL 

way he would like them to, not the way they do hap- 
pen. It seems from this angle preposterous to ask 
the novelist to invoke any forces except those intri- 
cate ones which he sees humanly operative in the 
naturalistic world about him ; forces which, so far as 
he can study them, achieve first of all the perpetuation 
of life and consciousness, and then the evolution of 
certain social ideals of conduct and of organization, 
but never by any chance a degree of progress which 
does not point beyond to something else stilj unat- 
tained. Life seems to be simply a preface to more life, 
a perpetual preparing for something that we get no 
nearer to, a march in a dream, in which we exhaust 
ourselves with marching and come out where we 
started. And the only happy man is he who learns to 
love marching itself, with all its fatigue and its uncer- 
tainty of a~ destination. The old tragic and comic 
forms reflect the belief in some kind of destination, — 
except indeed when they are mere profitless fable', 
— but the new -realism must continue, seemingly, to 
record the march. * 

The question is, thenj whether love of life and of 
those who live it is in itself enough for a faith. For 
after all this is the choice: between the temper that 
loves life and finds it sufficient, and the temper that 
loves life but finds it insufficient until it is explained 
and exalted by faith in something outside it. I say 
nothing about the realist who does not love life at all, 
who writes about it in distrust or contempt or stupor. 
Kealism has found room for him too, with his several 
kinds of morbidity and fleshliness and insistence on 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 203 

the primal brute in man. If he were a factor in tjie 
choice, we should have less, not more, to hope for. 
But the man who does honestly love human nature 
as it is, and does find the sight of humanity good, 
so that he really does not want any leverage to be 
exerted on the world from without ; to put the matter 
quite bluntly, the man who does not want a God, 
and would regard the existence of one as an unwar- 
rantable and meaningless intrusion into a scheme 
which means enough just by virtue of its own exist- 
ence — has that man, in democracy, solidarity, and 
the sense of kinship with his fellows, enough to hold 
to, and to build a great art upon ? 

It is a very important question, because that man is 
the artist of the present and, in all likelihood, ^)f the 
future. Meanwhile, it is useful ,f or us to see that his 
philosophy of life does not cut him off from criticism 
of life. He is still free to choose what he likes, what 
he wants, and to express his choice in a shape which 
shall have consistency and symmetry. If he distrust 
life, he can only express himself in comedies which 
turn' into farce, and in tragedies which show the 
ascendancy of the brute over the man. But if he trust 
life, he is free to single out the elements which in- 
spire his confidence, and to make of them his message ; 
he is free, as Miss Margaret Sherwood says in a finely 
idealistic essay, 1 for the "enduring realism" of 
"helping to make greater things real." 

After all, it is only in one generation, the present, 

i The Timidity of Our Boldness, Atlantic Monthly, Janu- 
ary, 1917, pp. 64-70. 



204 THE MODERN NOVEL 

that realism has become apathetic; and three of the 
greatest men of the literary generation before it, all 
of them essentially moderns and realists, preached a 
fine idealism. Meredith had a vision of something 
amounting to human perfectibility through purely 
human agencies ; Henry James proved that human na- 
ture is even now, in those of its aspects which he loved, 
rarer and finer than it commonly knows itself to be; 
and William Dean Howells, a generation ahead of 
even these two in discovering the religion of place, 
was preaching the most homespun realities and the 
"wise provincialism" of Royce at a time when patriot- 
ism was shame-faced and the intellectual ideal of the 
Western world was a shallow aesthetic cosmopolitan- 
ism. I can explain this paradox, the sluggishness of 
faith in life in our second generation of realists, only 
by the enervating weariness which comes upon any 
movement after it has outlived the inspiration of 
newness. The older realists welcomed as a challenge 
the dawn of a world in which man must do all for 
himself. They took up the defiance with the spirit 
of youth, always sanguine of its own powers and keen 
for the fight. Realism is older now, and begins to 
wonder, to think twice. But one generation is too 
short a time to be discouraged about. 

Meanwhile, we speculate about the new tragi-comedy 
of the real which must save imaginative fiction from 
purposeless realism, just as realism saved it from 
tragedy and comedy in which the purpose was too 
shallow and too false; and we find a clue to that 
renewing spirit of fiction, the spirit of idealistic 



TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 205 

realism, in such words as these of Mr. Howells, writ- 
ten long ago in answer to Matthew Arnold's comment 
that there was no "distinction" in our national 
life:— 

"... I would gladly persuade all artists intending 
greatness in any kind among us that the recognition 
of the fact pointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to be a 
source of inspiration to them, and not discouragement. 
We have been now some hundred years building up a 
state on the affirmation of the essential equality of 
men in their rights and duties, and whether we have 
been right or been wrong the gods have taken us at 
our word, and have responded to us with a civiliza- 
tion in which there is no 'distinction' perceptible to 
the eye that loves and values it. Such beauty and 
such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common 
grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the 
quality of solidarity so prevails that neither distin- 
guishes itself to the disadvantage of anything else. 
It seems to me that these conditions invite the artist 
to the study and the appreciation of the common, and 
to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher 
aspects which unite rather than sever humanity, if he 
would thrive in our new order of things. The talent 
that is robust enough to front the every-day world 
and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, 
brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter, though 
it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the supersti- 
tion of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the dis- 
tinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or 
carving or writing. The arts must become demo- 



206 THE MODERN NOVEL 

cratic, and then we shall have the expression of Amer- 
ica in art; and the reproach which Mr. Arnold was 
half right in making us shall have no justice in it any 
longer ; we shall be ' distinguished. ' ' ' x 

i Criticism and Fiction, pp. 138-40. New York: Harper 
and Bros. MDCCCXCIII. 



VIII 
HUMANISM 



In discussing the elements of tragedy and comedy 
in fiction, I hope I succeeded in showing that those 
elements, if they now existed in anything like the 
former measure, would derive an entirely changed sig- 
nificance from our changed conception of the whole 
world, and would in fact have lost a great part of 
their legitimate appeal to our emotions through our 
intellect. I implied a connection between those ele- 
ments as they once existed, and the artist's general 
philosophy. His comedy denoted a belief, conscious 
or unconscious, that everything was fundamentally 
right and would come out right; his tragedy, which 
showed evil as for the moment regnant over good, 
drew its compensation from the fact that the triumph 
of evil was only for the moment, an exceptional 
thing. Thus comedy and tragedy were both expres- 
sions, one positive, the other negative, of an absolute 
and unquestioning faith in the goodness of life. 
Comedy expressed that faith directly; tragedy 
showed how many and how severe were the temporary 
checks it could persist in spite of. 

But with the disappearance of that older philosophy 
and the rise of a new philosophy in which the appear- 
ances are the reality and the sum of the appearances 
is the sum of the reality, absolute tragedy and comedy 
become virtually impossible. Either, being an ex- 

209 



210 THE MODERN NOVEL 

treme, would connote a view of the world which no one 
can hold, so long as he derives his view from the world 
itself. And either becomes, therefore, an inartistic 
misrepresentation of life, a travesty and something 
like a lie. In brief, tragedy and comedy were, 
in one way or another, outgrowths of general ideas 
about fate and life; and it is the change in general 
ideas that has forced tragedy and comedy out of all 
fiction which subordinates every ideal to the quest 
and the study of truth. 

There can be not much doubt, I suppose, about the 
second half of this account. The change in our gen- 
eral attitude has beyond question the effect of forcing 
out of fiction the old assumptions and definite conclu- 
sions and of replacing them by questions and hesita- 
tions, research among things knowable and demonstra- 
ble. Modern thinking can hardly coexist in art with 
the unrelieved tragic or comic outcome. 

But am I right in the first half of my account ? Is 
it true that the general ideas in fiction have changed, 
or is it simply that they have just begun to make 
their way into fiction? Is not the chief mark of the 
older novel its entire freedom from philosophy of 
whatever sort, and is not the chief distinction of the 
older novelists their absolute divorce from every re- 
sponsibility except the study and mastery of human 
nature seen through imagination ? Is not the present 
concern of the novel with large general truths a new 
thing, and may it not mean simply the decadence of 
the novel because of the lack of great individual artists 
with their inspired knowledge of the specific? May 



HUMANISM 211 

not the philosophy in our fiction be our feeble attempt 
to replace the particular, which means too little to us, 
with the general, which has not so secure a place in 
art? Ought not the particular, rather than the gen- 
eral, to be the prime concern of the artist, his inspira- 
tion and his home ? Or, to narrow the question down 
to a pocketable and arguable form: Historically 
speaking, does philosophy belong in the novel at all? 
Is it either necessary or desirable ? 

The modern artist answers, of course, that the 
worker in fiction must have at his command both the 
general and the particular, that his task is to repre- 
sent the general through the particular, to master both 
the facts and their meanings. In the technical jar- 
gon, art is both presentative and representative. But 
this is only his answer, a certain kind of opinion ; and 
it leaves the question where it was, to be squarely 
faced as an issue on which hangs our acceptance or 
rejection of a good deal that has happened since 1860, 
the date when, roughly speaking, the modern novel 
began to pay tribute to modern rationalism and ac- 
quire thereby an intellect and a social conscience. 

Need I emphasize the momentousness of the ques- 
tion? Its vast import becomes at once self-evident 
if we ask it about Shakspere, by whom the Western 
part of the world has pretty well agreed to let a good 
share of its theories of creative art stand or fall. 
Shakspere was not, to be sure, a novelist, even of the 
Elizabethan school; but our question is large enough 
to bear on the drama equally, and any one's imagina- 
tion can bridge the gap between the sort of plays 



212 THE MODERN NOVEL 

Shakspere wrote and the sort of novels he would have 
written if he had lived in the age of Fielding. I 
choose Shakspere, first because no other one figure is 
grand enough to provide so crucial a test of any- 
sweeping generalization about art, and secondly be- 
cause in him it is harder than in- any other to trace 
the existence and the importance of any general theo- 
ries whatsoever, so that if we find them in him we 
shall hardly be able to overlook their importance else- 
where. 

Let us not be put off with assumptions, such as that 
any artist, whether he wishes to or not, whether he is 
prophet and seer or mere entertainer, must, as a 
first condition of greatness, reflect the principal opin- 
ions of his age. Let us assume nothing whatever 
about Shakspere. Let us recognize two facts: first, 
that if Shakspere can be shown to have gained as 
a dramatist through believing something about the 
soul and its immortality and about the ethical organi- 
zation of man's life by a will outside man, then the 
presence of philosophy in imaginative literature has 
the highest thinkable historical sanction and a greatly 
lengthened ancestry in modern times ; secondly, that, 
if Shakspere can be shown pagan, conscience-free, and 
careless of all except the reality in the life and char- 
acter which he portrayed, then we are entitled to say 
that an artist's theories of the world, so far from being 
important, may be only disguises for his insufficiency 
as an artist. If Shakspere means more when we con- 
sider him at bottom a philosopher, then philosophy is 
certainly at home in art. If, on the other hand, he 



HUMANISM 213 



means more when regarded, in Emerson's phrase, as 
"only master of the revels," then philosophy in art 
may be only an interloper, a skeleton in the closet 
or a spectre at the feast. In which way are we to 
accept Shakspere, and how can we make up our 
minds ? 



II 



Not, I think, by trying to go where so many genera- 
tions of scholars have failed to find quite what they 
sought — that is, into the intricacies of textual criti- 
cism. Not by trying to prove out of Shakspere 's own 
written words that he believed any particular doc- 
trine that could be construed as a cosmic philosophy. 
We do not need, in this connection and for this pur- 
pose, to convict him of having been orthodox or hereti- 
cal, Christian or pagan, ascetic or voluptuary, philos- 
opher or fool. Let us fix in our minds the question 
and its purpose. The question is not what Shak- 
spere believed, or even, exactly, whether he be- 
lieved anything in particular; it is whether the 
plays as we have them mean more, or less, if we 
suppose their author to have had some definite 
theory of human life in its relation to eternity and 
to fate. And the purpose of the question is that 
we may find out, in this one crucial instance, whether 
philosophy has or has not a place in imaginative art. 
The only method necessary to such an inquiry is the 
broadly pragmatic one of weighing what Shakspere 
means to us, as we speculate upon his whole purpose 



214 THE MODERN NOVEL 

and significance ; and in order that we may escape so 
far as possible the bias of our own time, and avoid 
making Shakspere mean simply what we wish him to 
mean, we ought to look at him through the eyes of the 
generations of criticism, trying if we can find the 
key that unlocks the most secrets — not accepting this 
or that critic's view, however stoutly defended, but 
setting off one thing against another and seeing what 
it all comes to when applied to the essential Shakspere, 
the Shakspere of the sonnets, the narrative poems, and 
the plays. 

Now, as soon as we are ready to give up trying to 
prove that Shakspere believed or did not believe this 
or that; as soon as we make it our affair to get the 
richest available composite view of him and base our 
judgment on it instead of on any individual interpre- 
tation; as soon as we cease to care very much what 
unexpressed faith he held, and begin to care exceed- 
ingly what faith does most for the meaning of his 
work — what faith, artistically speaking, he ought to 
have held — then we shall be on the verge of a strik- 
ing revelation. This method, pursued in this attitude, 
will tell us what we ask, and more. It will answer 
the question about philosophy, — that is, whether it has 
eternal fitness in art, — and it will answer with all but 
the most absolute certainty the question I have care- 
fully refrained thus far from asking, — that is, What 
was Shakspere 's philosophy? 

The answer contains everything that the textual 
critics, being not pragmatists but scientists, have 
sought and must seek in vain, the dramatist's im- 



HUMANISM 215 

personal aloofness from, his material defeating and 
eluding them at every turn. It is an answer that 
not only makes the plays cry out to us to be read 
in a certain way and seen through the window 
of certain fundamental beliefs, but actually tells 
us with almost unerring precision what those beliefs 
must be. At least we can reach, through the answer, 
this point : we can say with complete assurance either 
that Shakspere believed steadfastly those doctrines in 
the light of which the plays crave to be interpreted, 
or else that he was the lightest, most irresponsible of 
mortals, with not a shred of consistency to identify 
Shakspere the artist with Shakspere the man. It is 
easier for me to believe that those two are one than it 
is to believe that Shakspere was only a facile pres- 
tidigitator, admitting no connection between the words 
he wrote and the man he was, and achieving by some 
queer accident forty complete works which merely hap- 
pened to focus themselves on an interpretation of life 
that he had never thought of and on a belief that he 
had never held. This alternative seems precluded by 
the very nature of the relation between the creator 
and the creation, in art and everywhere else; and 
therefore I say, The doctrines which make the plays 
mean most to us and, so far as we can judge, to all 
time, are the doctrines which Shakspere believed. If, 
however, any one likes to believe that the doctrines 
which do most for the plays are the doctrines which 
Shakspere did not believe, he is welcome to that self- 
indulgence. For all I need to insist on at this mo- 
ment is the extreme fitness and justice of our letting 



216 THE MODERN NOVEL 

the plays read themselves in the light of certain truths 
which greatly intensify their meaning, even if we 
doubt whether Shakspere saw those truths. 

The central revelation of the plays to us is this : that 
they are the work of a man who understood — whether 
with his intellect or only with his intuition makes no 
difference — that eternity, fate, God, the immortality 
of the soul, eventual punishment and reward are in 
one sense simply not man's affair at all; that they are 
fundamentally unintelligible to his finite mind, the 
most irrelevant, even if the most enthralling, of his 
concerns. These things are in the lap of the gods; 
and man's affair, to state it in some very modern- 
sounding words, is to "will what the gods will with- 
out, perhaps, being certain what their will is — or even 
if they have a will of their own." * We do not in the 
least know whether Shakspere believed in the exist- 
ence of God ; but we do know that, if he so believed, the 
meaning of God was in man's need of him. We do 
not know whether he believed in the immortality of 
the self-conscious soul; but we do know that, if he 
so believed, it was the will to immortality that inter- 
ested him, and not the immortality itself as a hypothe- 
sis. In every way he accepts, faithfully and joyously, 
the finite conditions of man 's life here and now, the im- 
passable bounds beyond which reason and knowledge 
cannot penetrate. We cannot imagine him as being 
indifferent to anything that was human; but neither 
can we imagine him as being interested in anything 

U Personal Record. By Joseph Conrad. Harper & Bros. 
MCMX1I. P. 13. 



HUMANISM 217 

except because it was human. And when he listens 
to man's "Fables of the Above,'' it makes little differ- 
ence whether he takes them as fables or as truths: 
either way, what touches him most nearly is that 
they are man's, wrought out of man's own desire or 
need. 

It may indeed be so; this may indeed be the lost 
or mislaid truth of our Shakspere. I spoke of his 
critics, the history of appreciation of him. What I 
had in mind was this : Every attempt to identify the 
message and the meaning of Shakspere with the tenets 
of any individual or of any age has resulted simply in 
the belittling of Shakspere. 1 Assume him Anglican, 
and you have cut off a part of him that we should 
all like to keep; assume him Catholic, and you have 
made him only part of what he seems to us. He is 
not atheist, he is not theist ; that is, he is not primarily 
either one or the other. In his pragmatism, the ques- 
tion of whether God made man or man made God 
makes no conceivable difference to anything that can 
be known or experienced; and every critic who has 
attempted to define Shakspere by a definite formula 
of faith or of doubt has subjected Shakspere to a limi- 
tation to which nothing in Shakspere gives any suffi- 
cient sanction. 

Now, when you scan one after another these 
special and restricting interpretations of the master 
and pick out the weakness in each; and when, 

y. i For an accessible summary of such attempts, see Shake- 
speare Criticism (Heminge and Condell to Carlyle). Intro- 
duction by D. Niehol Smith. Oxford University Press. 1916. 



218 THE MODERN NOVEL 

having done that, you search for the formula which 
escapes all the weaknesses and leaves Shakspere mean- 
ing the utmost that he can mean when left free to in- 
terpret himself, you find that the only theory which 
robs him of no glory, the only one which leaves him 
in full possession of all that we actually find in him, is 
this theory of his humanism. The Shakspere we know 
through the plays and poems was a man who could 
have made the epigram, "If God had not existed, it 
would have been necessary to invent him"; for Shak- 
spere had the supreme revelation that, whether God 
did exist or whether man did invent him, the effect on 
man's conscious life in the knowable world is pre- 
cisely one and the same. This is the revelation that 
makes our Shakspere, not Anglican, not Catholic, not 
demonstrably pagan or Christian, Epicurean or Stoic, 
but pragmatist by temper, and by intuition humanist. 



Ill 



When, in talk with a sharp-witted young student 
of literature, I ventured to broach this theory that, 
for Shakspere, man's conscious life was the focal 
point of all reality, that everything in the universe, 
real or fancied, was valuable to Shakspere only in 
so far as it touched man, and that all attempts to 
confine the meaning of Shakspere by any other form- 
ula resulted in a belittlement of him to the critic's 
own preconception, I was met, expecting indeed noth- 
ing less, by this rejoinder: "But how do you know 
that this humanistic interpretation of Shakspere is not 



HUMANISM 219 

also a belittlement of him? Why isn't it just as 
narrow for the 20th century to find him humanist 
as it was for the 18th to find him Anglican or atheist ? 
Aren't you simply proposing that every age shall 
find Shakspere to be whatever it happens to prefer? 
And can you ever have a unified Shakspere short of 
a unifying philosophy that shall reconcile all the dis- 
crepancies and all the prejudices?" 

It is of course true that we have no more right to 
interpret Shakspere in our way than Dr. Johnson had 
to interpret him in his. But there are some points to 
be urged in favour of our interpretation against the 
sum of all the others. 

First, it seems to me important that our interpreta- 
tion leaves room for what is essential in the others. 
There is nothing whatever in Shakspere to prohibit my 
identifying him with any religion I happen person- 
ally to believe in, provided I see that, whatever the 
religion be, his emphasis is upon its meaning to some- 
body, to man. Shakspere may have believed that 
death is the end of consciousness, or he may have be- 
lieved that it is the transition to eternal life ; but in 
either case it is the end of the temporal life, which 
has, in either case, to be lived in the same way. He 
may have believed that God was one or that God was 
three, that God is love or that God is vengeance ; but 
none of these differences has anything whatever to 
do with his conception of godliness. Humanism, the 
creed in which all the religions and all the philosophies 
meet at a common point, the sum of the elements 
common to them all, is at once reconcilable with each 



220 THE MODERN NOVEL 

and greater than any. It is the one philosophy which 
uses every other to the glorification of life — of life, 
which alone means anything to art. A sceptical age 
will understand Shakspere as portraying the courage 
of man living on his mote of dust in empty space, 
serenely unafraid of the dark out into which he must 
presently go, and heartening himself with his fables 
of light beyond the darkness. A believing age will 
understand him as portraying the courage of man liv- 
ing by the evidence of things not seen, the substance 
of things hoped for. But what they must both under- 
stand, if they are to have what Shakspere gives, is his 
mastery of the one thing — the courage of man. Man 
is the genesis of all things accessible to art; and the 
task of Shakspere is to tell all the truth, not about the 
religions and philosophies as facts, but about their 
meaning to man and their effect upon him — the effect, 
I mean, which they have upon him whether they be 
true or false, historical or apocryphal. This is the 
only reading of Shakspere which exalts him as in- 
terpreter of what is quintessential in our tangled life 
— as which, nearly all criticism admits him to be 
supreme. 

Secondly, a historical consideration. The Renais- 
sance came late to England, but with intensity. And 
when it came it put England almost at once in 
possession, not only of the classical learning, but of 
all the modern humanistic embroidery upon it of a 
century of continental Renaissance. Everybody who 
has studied even superficially the Cinquecento in Italy 
knows how merely nominal was the subservience of 



HUMANISM 221 

philosophy to religion, and how orthodoxy was subtly 
corroded by speculative doctrines preached from 
within the very Church, and calculated to deceive the 
very elect. The Church was largely given over to 
materialism; and, so long as its temporal power was 
not endangered, it was not above housing and feeding 
the philosophers who gave it intellectual prestige even 
while they undermined its doctrinal foundations. The 
Church was cannily making to itself friends of the 
Mammon of unrighteousness ; and it was an age when 
one could hear atheism and the mortality of the soul 
preached in high places, in discourse which paid to the 
Church no other tribute than the use of its ritual and 
its vocabulary. It was an age of humanism and 
free-thinking; and one of its chief symptoms is 
the delight of intellectual men in metaphysical specula- 
tion for its own sake — that is, for the training of the 
mind in subtlety and agility and poise, and for the 
sense that the human intellect could get beyond and 
outside everything. In short, it was an age when 
philosophy and scholasticism were nothing if not 
humanistic; and from a thousand references in the 
plays and sonnets, and from the general delight of 
Shakspere in metaphysical hair-splitting, sometimes 
purely verbal, one can trace his profound kinship with 
these developments, his triumphant joy in the intel- 
lect as an instrument giving man sway over space 
and time. 

I urge this point against the suggestion that the 
humanistic interpretation is only our 20th century 
way of circumscribing Shakspere, of outfitting him 



222 THE MODERN NOVEL 

with our parochial philosophy. As a fact, our 
philosophy comes much nearer to naturalism. But 
then humanism was in the air; he would have 
been more than man, or less than artist, if he had 
wholly escaped it. His humanism can be accounted 
for historically without going farther back than his 
own 16th century. With time, we could extend 
the ancestry of humanism to classical Greece and 
Rome — to the great harbours of ancient cultivation in 
which all that is most precious in the Middle Ages has 
its origins, and in which, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch 
points out in his book On the Art of Writing, 1 the 
moral and spiritual life of our own time has its im- 
movable anchorage. 

IV 

Both philosophically and historically, then, the 
humanistic reading of Shakspere has justification, a 
most persuasive reasonableness. And when, finally, 
we come to the supreme works themselves, we find al- 
most everything to corroborate, almost nothing to 
deny. I pass over all but a hint or two of the strong 
tendency which Shakspere everywhere shows to let his 
vivid realization of man 's temporal life take the form 
of a complete and untroubled agnosticism about 
everything else. There is plenty of evidence that he 
conceived death as a sweet oblivion, a surcease from 
that of which life is full enough ; and the sweet finality 
of that repose, the profound immobility of that sleep 

i New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 



HUMANISM 223 



immune from even the fear of dreams which should 
prove life not utterly extinguished, are lyrical notes 
sounded always with a tenderness which must have 
had something to do with Shakspere's own desire. 
Death is to him * ' death 's dateless night ' ' ; and again 
and again he expresses the purely humanistic concep- 
tion of immortality in contexts where, if he had be- 
lieved in any other conception, he must have given 
some hint. All, his sonnets of the love of men and 
women are haunted by this note, of beauty in the very 
finiteness of the experience ; and in the sonnets of re- 
membered love, there is nowhere expressed the hope of 
reunion after death, or of any renewal except that of 
memory re-creating out of its need the desired shape, 
the lost presence. 

And all of the phrases which, isolated, bear some 
seeming hint of orthodox faith, seem in their contexts 
to crave another interpretation. The exquisite an- 
tiphonal dirge in Cymheline speaks of a task done, a 
home reached, wages ta 'en ; but that home, it at once 
appears, is the grave's " quiet consummation," and 
the wages are oblivion for the consciousness and re- 
nown in the memories of others. ' l Thou hast finished 
joy and moan," "To thee the reed is as the oak." 

"No exorciser harm thee! 
Nor no witchcraft charm thee! 
Ghost unlaid forbear thee ! 
Nothing ill come near thee!" 

— such negative immortality is the reward, and the 
only suggestion of a positive immortality is that thor- 



224 THE MODERN NOVEL 



oughly humanistic faith that the living can confer 
perpetual life upon the dead by not forgetting their 
lives. 

Even the famous and controverted Sonnet CXLVI, 
with its cry of triumph over death, 

"And Death once dead, there's no more dying then," 

seems on analysis to be a plea for intensifying the in- 
ward life of the soul by something very like a re- 
ligious ascetic's mortification of the body. This son- 
net is one of many records of the duality of Shak- 
spere, of the perpetual conflict in his life and mind 
between a starry poet, dreamer, and idealist, and an 
earth-bound respectable citizen who took thought for 
the morrow, both tenants of the same clay. 

"Why so large cost, having so short a lease, 
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?" 

Rather, let the soul live on the loss of its servant, the 
body; let the soul, renewed in its own ardent extra- 
physical life, glory in the body's failure and decay; do 
not devote the powers that are at best short-lived to 
making costly provision for the worms which are "in- 
heritors of this excess." Instead, "feed on Death, 
that feeds on men"; that is, 

"Within be fed, without be rich no more." 

The sonnet comes down, then, to a simple assertion 
that when we live most imaginatively and least mate- 
rially we rob death by leaving so much less for pal- 
pable dissolution, and so much more for the cherishing 
memories of other men to seize on; we kill death by 



HUMANISM 225 

starvation. And this idealistic humanism seems to be 
everywhere Shakspere's principal thought about 
eternity. 

When we come to the ghosts, we find in them only 
confirmation of this same idealistic humanism. Now, 
it is true enough that Shakspere may have accepted 
unthinkingly — or, for that matter, thinkingly — the 
superstition of his time. He may easily have be- 
lieved in the reality, even in the corporeality, of 
spirits of the dead. But it is to be noted, first of all, 
that that was essentially a pagan, not a Christian, 
superstition; a belief, not in immortal spirits, but 
simply in the unlaid ghost. Oblivion was coming; 
but there was some debt left unpaid in the flesh, some 
wrong unrighted, which stood between the tortured 
spirit and the longed-for " quiet consummation ' ' of the 
grave. The failure to have achieved oblivion was 
always in itself a tragedy; and the ghost's one con- 
cern was to shake off those evil dreams of reality 
which had persisted even beyond the body's corrup- 
tion, in order that it might lie down to an eternity 
of rest. 

Whether or not Shakspere did accept this supersti- 
tion is a matter of little consequence. His plays 
neither gain nor lose anything of great importance, 
whether the ghosts in them are staged as visible appa- 
ritions or as ideal and symbolical perceptions in the 
minds of the actors. For, whatever Shakspere's own 
attitude toward the pagan concept of the unlaid ghost, 
he found the only way to cheat it of its grossness. 
The ghost always exists, not to show something 



226 THE MODERN NOVEL 

about a life other than that which our senses 
know, but to show something purely spiritual and 
moral about this life. Its revelation is of guilt 
or of duty here and now, not of a promised here- 
after. The ghost of Hamlet's father exists for 
Hamlet, the ghost of Banquo for Macbeth ; they exert 
a further pressure, the one upon a feeling of responsi- 
bility, the other upon a feeling of guilt — which feel- 
ings exist already as products of causes not supernat- 
ural. And so it is everywhere in the plays : the mean- 
ing is the same whether the ghost be understood by the 
audience as having an objective or a subjective exist- 
ence. 

In this point of fundamental meaning, as in so 
many other points, Shakspere is our exact contempo- 
rary. His evident sense of the grossness of using 
ghostly apparitions to prove the hereafter is like, for 
example, Mr. Howells's sense of the same fact as Mr. 
Howells expresses it in The Undiscovered Country 
and, later, in The Leatherwood God. The Undiscov- 
ered Country is a novel about the phenomena of 
" spiritualism" which, like all wise novels about that 
theme, comes to the conclusion that such phenomena, 
regardless of their authenticity, are in their nature 
and significance wholly irreligious. Intelligence 
lapses from faith in it, Dr. Boynton explains, be- 
cause "it is not spiritualism at all, but materialism, — 
a grosser materialism than that which denies; a ma- 
terialism that asserts and affirms, and appeals for 
proof to purely physical phenomena. All other sys- 
tems of belief, all other revelations of the unseen 



HUMANISM 227 

world, have supplied a rule of life, have been given 
for our use here. But this offers nothing but the bar- 
ren fact that we live again. If it has had any effect 
upon morals, it has been to corrupt them. I cannot 
see how it is better in its effect upon this world than 
sheer atheism. It is as thoroughly godless as atheism 
itself, and no man can accept it upon any other man 's 
word, because it has not yet shown its truth in the 
ameliorated life of men. It leaves them where it 
found them, or else a little worse for the conceit with 
which it fills them." 1 And again: ". . . as long 
as it is used merely to establish the fact of a future 
life it will remain sterile. It will continue to be 
doubted, like a conjurer's trick, by all who have not 
seen it ; and those who see it will afterwards come to 
discredit their own senses. The world has been 
mocked with something of the kind from the be- 
ginning; it's no new thing. Perhaps the hope of 
absolute assurance is given us only to be broken for 
our rebuke. Life is not so long at the longest that 
we need be impatient. If we wake, we shall know ; if 
we do not wake, we shall not even know that we have 
not awakened. . . . 'The undiscovered country from 
whose bourn no traveller returns.' . . . and Hamlet 
says no traveller returns, when he believes that he 
has just seen his father's spirit! The ghost that 
comes back to prove itself can't hold him to a belief 
in its presence after the heated moment of vision is 
past ! We must doubt it ; we are better with no proof. 
Yes; yes! The undiscovered country — thank God, it 

i The Undiscovered Country, Chapter XXIV. 



228 THE MODERN NOVEL 

can be what these babblers say! The undiscovered 
country — what a weight of doom is in the words — 
and hope ! " * 

Dr. Boynton's modern humanistic notion of religion 
and of its meaning in no wise shifts the accent of 
Shakspere. How could there be a more sweeping 
illustration of Shakspere 's success in making his 
works embody a philosophy which is all things to all 
men, in which all the creeds and all the doubts forget 
their differences and meet at a common centre ? This 
alone, of all possible interpretations, abolishes the 
question whether he was orthodox or heretical, and 
places its accent on the one indubitable reality be- 
longing to universal ideas: the reality derived, not 
from their source or their absolute truth, but from 
their knowable effects on human imagination and will. 



Some such things I believe that Shakspere believed. 
At all events the plays, so interpreted, contain the 
most utter truth with the least arguable matter. 
And if that be true, we cannot doubt the right to its 
place of the philosophy which so interprets them. 
This humanism, putting in abeyance all the questions 
to which there is no final answer, and content to dwell 
in the realm of knowable things, is the perfect philos- 
ophy for art; for it alone can range widely, as art 
must do, among such actualities as imagination and 

i The Undiscovered Country, Chapter XXIV. 



HUMANISM 229 

faith, — in a word, all the more spiritual parts of our 
human organization, — and at the same time refrain, 
as art must do, from postulating an objective existence 
for the other-worldly creations of imagination and 
faith. Humanism makes room for every dream, 
every hope; yet it leaves humanity and the human 
struggle illustrious enough to enthrall us for their 
own sakes, as they cannot do under a creed which 
makes man a mere footnote to the rest of creation or 
a caprice of the will of God. 

In the glare of light which this reading of Shak- 
spere throws upon the nature and the history of im- 
aginative fiction we can decipher, it seems to me, a 
broadly complete rationale for the philosophy therein. 
Humanism — a philosophy, if one insist, made out of 
the rejection of philosophies, the refusal to consider 
any cosmic doctrine except as a force in human life — 
humanism is almost a synonym of the artistic temper 
itself; because, like the artistic temper, it exalts the 
self-sufficiency of the real without limiting its bound- 
aries. By the same logic, the other possible philo- 
sophies, supernaturalism and naturalism, are made 
to fall into their places in relation to art. They clash 
with it precisely where humanism re-enforces it ; and 
their centre is elsewhere than its centre. Super- 
naturalism undermines the significance of that reality 
which is necessarily the subject-matter of art by re- 
ducing our temporal life to an infinitesimal fraction of 
the cosmic scheme ; and all art produced under it has 
tacitly the nature of mere diversion or beguilement, 
meet for hours of " moral holiday" perhaps, but in- 



230 THE MODERN NOVEL 

herently lacking in moral dignity, and almost frankly 
contravening the laws of the universe in which it is 
conceived. In a word, supernaturalism is an infirm 
motive power for art because it reduces to a hollow 
pretence the necessary assumption of art that the 
temporal is important ; only the eternal really counts. 
And naturalism, to which man is only a " disease of 
the dust," has also, in a somewhat different way, the 
defect that it reduces man to too puny a stature to 
be greatly tragic or comic. But still more it has the 
fault of belittling the spiritual in man and exalting 
proportionately the physical, the material. And, just 
as supernaturalism either stifles art altogether or else 
treats it as something to be tolerated along with other 
concessions to mortal frailty, so naturalism tends to 
circumscribe art by confining it to ''realism" — either 
the foul realism of those who are panegyrists of the 
brute in man, or the sterile literalism of those who 
report what is, exhausting the material facts of crea- 
tion and ignoring our- questions about the possible 
sense of it. Supernaturalism refuses to take art 
seriously enough to justify it ; and naturalism refuses 
to take the higher faculties of man seriously enough 
to let art justify itself. 

In actual practice, the best fiction produced under 
each of these two philosophies has been saved by the 
failure of the artist to take his philosophy with en- 
tire seriousness. In a completely naturalistic world, 
probably no art could be produced at all ; for natural- 
ism is interested in the results which are most logically 
and visibly the effects of natural law, and least in- 



HUMANISM 231 

terested in civilization, which humanism calls "an 
organized revolt against nature.' ' A large body of 
naturalistic fiction is written to belittle those very 
art-producing faculties to which it is indebted for 
its own existence. And as for supernaturalism, I 
suppose it obvious that of the century of novelists 
from Fielding to Thackeray very few applied their 
faiths more seriously to the business of writing novels 
than the average nominal Christian of the same period 
applied his Christianity to the business of daily liv- 
ing; and both Fielding and Thackeray, theoretically 
sound moralists though they are, derive from the 
contemplation of human naughtiness an impish de- 
light which must greatly have perturbed them if their 
theories had really come first. 

The fact seems to be, then, that writers who were 
not humanists with their whole minds have profited 
by the extent to which they were unconscious human- 
ists in their tastes — the extent, that is, to which their 
temperaments failed to square with their consciences. 
No one supposes that the exquisite high comedy of 
Jane Austen is invalidated by the failure of its world 
to show any particular correspondence with the ortho- 
doxy of her ultimate beliefs; or that Dickens's 
democratic vaudeville is seriously interfered with by 
his Trinitarianism ; or that Meredith's criticism of 
society as it is constituted seems less momentous be- 
cause he was in part a mystical optimist, working 
from a belief in human perfectibility toward no less 
an end than human perfection. These facts, examples 
of the clash between great art and an underlying 



232 THE MODERN NOVEL 

philosophy which does not help explain its greatness, 
are sometimes alleged as proofs that philosophy has 
nothing to say to art. What they really prove is that 
no other philosophy than humanism is tenable in the 
work of fiction. They reaffirm concretely the points 
here asserted theoretically: the failure of naturalism 
and of supernaturalism to locate their centres of 
interest where fiction must locate its centre, and the 
coincidence at every point of the humanistic doctrine 
with the artistic feeling. It is inevitable that some- 
thing should be withdrawn from the sanction and the 
dignity of art in conditions where it cannot exist in 
whole-hearted fidelity to the belief which nominally 
engenders it; and this withdrawal is one meaning of 
our ancestors' prolonged distrust of the novel on 
moral and religious grounds, and of an odd parallel 
to that distrust in the patronizing condescension to- 
ward the arts in our modern world of naturalistic 
belief used to enthrone material competition. 

A point to close on, for re-enforcement of the argu- 
ment about the inclusiveness of humanism, is this: 
However sceptically one may regard the utter self- 
identification of art with a particular way of thinking 
about the sense of creation, at least one can see the 
legitimacy of ideas in fiction as objects, as material. 
Even the unmoralist in aesthetics has only to be in- 
terested in seeing fiction enlarge its province and its 
powers, in order to perceive that the novel must treat 
any and all ideas as soon as it becomes interested in 
protagonists who hold them. Four names will serve 
roughly to show the acquisitiveness of fiction. Defoe 



HUMANISM 233 

investigated the physical life, actions; Richardson 
added the emotional life, sensibilities; George Eliot 
the moral life, conscience ; and Meredith, our modern 
of moderns in this particular among others, the in- 
tellectual life — ideas. Meredith identifies himself un- 
reservedly with certain general ideas : ^a kind of pagan 
optimism, a kind of nobly unfaddish feminism, a set of 
prerequisites to the existence of a perfect society, 
a faithful acceptance of the evolutionary and biologi- 
cal unity of all things. He would have been glad to 
stand or fall by the validity of those ideas. Yet en- 
sues the paradox that Meredith stands though the 
ideas fall, simply because he made his novels so search- 
ing a record of how some distinguished and unique 
minds did actually think. The novels remain as 
humanistic embodiments of important realities, even 
if they pass as an apologia for Meredith 's own mysti- 
cal optimism. 

At this point of his achievement Meredith reaches 
the stature of the grandest humanists, including 
Shakspere. For he had a comprehensive enough mind 
to make his works last for what is in them, no matter 
what should become of the reasons behind them. This 
greatest triumph of the artist is also the logical con- 
summation of the humanist. 



IX 
DESIGN 



If I have succeeded in making a just account of 
the place which properly belongs to philosophy in 
fiction, I have brought out at the same time the most 
cogent of the reasons why the shape of fiction as an 
art has undergone certain marked changes during the 
past half century. Up to 1859 roughly — the year of 
the first novel of George Eliot, and a date which has 
in the history of fiction something of the momentous- 
ness which we ascribe to it in that of science — the 
philosophy in fiction is felt either as an intruder or 
as a guest whose presence is hardly suspected at all; 
though, as I tried to show, that unsuspected presence 
is more advantage, than disadvantage. Probably all 
of us do, whether we know it or not, have a philosophy, 
even if only a philosophy of negations ; and, having it, 
we perforce look at the world through it. This un- 
awareness is the attitude of the drama and of the 
novel before George Eliot — except, of course, in 
homiletic, allegorical, or symbolistic pieces such as 
The Life and Death of Mr. Badman or Rasselas. 
But from the time of George Eliot the philosophy in 
fiction is intensely aware of itself, determined to make 
the most of itself as an opportunity, not merely put 
up with itself as a necessity. And from the moment 
of this conscious acceptance and welcome of phil- 
osophy, an entirely new set of considerations begins 

237 



238 THE MODERN NOVEL 

to govern the shape of fiction. The novel, whenever 
it deserved its hold on us, has always combined truth 
with pleasure; but when the emphasis shifted from 
pleasure to truth, there appeared a new determining 
principle of inclusion and exclusion, a new standard 
of criticism for the devices and expedients which 
fiction had evolved during its vassalage to pleasure. 
I can best state the change as an enormous decrease 
of the accidental and arbitrary, and a corresponding 
increase of the causal. The shortest name for the 
transition is George Eliot, who was doing perhaps her 
best work during the life of Thackeray, and nearly 
all of her work during the life of Dickens, but who 
is animated by a more modern spirit than either. 
George Eliot represents the universe naturally con- 
ceived as an organism ; man as a subordinated unit of 
its evolution and not, philosophically, the pivot of the 
whole; the intricate dovetailing of cause and effect 
everywhere ; the facts of good and evil as products of 
remote and invisible causes in heredity and environ- 
ment; the ungovernable sway of chance in human 
lives, reducing them, whether it destroy or fulfil, to 
mere pawns in an inscrutable game; — in fine, the 
character which is fate and the fate which is above 
character. To express with any fulness this duality 
of the world and the individual, she must abandon 
the worn machinery of coincidence and mystery, the 
various wires and levers by which the novelist himself 
remains palpably in control of his spectacle ; she must 
substitute for these the machinery of human will and 
natural forces. To begin with, she must have a nar- 



DESIGN 239 



row scene, where nature itself reduces life to a man- 
ageable simplicity; and hence she follows the pro- 
vincial ideal by which Jane Austen so unconsciously 
profited — how wondrously we know when we stop to 
think that we are now only just learning how high, 
even if how small, is the place rightfully hers. Then, 
she must study not merely the actions of men and 
women : she must study the directions of their lives, 
the corrosion of character by its worst or weakest, 
all the implications of her accustomed theme, "the 
idealist in search of a vocation ' ' ; and hence she must 
reduce the number of events until none remain ex- 
cept those which have profound importance as illus- 
trating the direction of the lives concerned — the 
episodes are reduced in number, and mean individu- 
ally more. Finally, she must investigate not only the 
physical realities of actions and the emotions that 
underlie them, but the moral principles that underlie 
emotion and choice; she must go more deeply than 
the novel has been wont to go into the moral and in- 
tellectual life of her protagonists, in order to bring 
forth by reflection and analysis those realities which 
can be expressed but imperfectly, or not at all, in 
action; whence Savonarola in his cell, Bulstrode on 
his knees. This patient and fruitful search for the 
causality in life is the distinguishing contribution of 
George Eliot to the novel. 

In her we see, then, at least three significant 
changes in the shape of the novel, changes which it 
has mostly retained and intensified since the con- 
clusion of her work : first, the narrow scene, appointed 



240 THE MODERN NOVEL 

for rigorous specialization in a few persona?; sec- 
ondly, the elimination of deliberate artifice in the 
manufacture of plots, and the attempt instead to 
bring the action out of the personam and the clash of 
their wills and personalities ; thirdly, enlargement of 
the scope and importance of analysis of motives and 
feelings. 

That such are indeed the chief traits of George 
Eliot as a novelist is shown by our instinctive 
objection to her few lapses into the factitious and the 
accidental. Sir Leslie Stephen says of a certain 
episode in Romola: "Poor Romola, in her despair, 
gets into a miscellaneous boat lying ashore; and the 
boat drifts away in a manner rarely practised by boats 
in real life, and spontaneously lands her in a place 
where everybody is dying of the plague, and she can 
therefore make herself useful to her fellow-creatures. 
She clearly ought to have been drowned, like Maggie, 
and we feel that Providence is made to interfere 
rather awkwardly. ' ' x We all share the feeling ; but 
it is a feeling which we should never experience with 
the same force in connection with Dickens or Thack- 
eray — writers from whom we expect a full measure 
of everything that can by any possibility be put into 
the work of fiction. That we should have the feeling 
in connection with such palpable contrivances in 
George Eliot as this extraordinary boat of Romola 's, 
shows in itself how essentially the novel had altered 
its shape by 1864 — how unmistakably the philosophi- 

i George Eliot (English Men of Letters Series). By Leslie 
Stephen. New York: The Macmillan Company. P. 138. 



DESIGN 241 



cal point of view had even then brought about the 
modern change from the casual to the causal. 



II 



This general change that has come over the form of 
the novel is, then, the substitution of a higher unity 
for a lower. The effect of naturalistic philosophy in 
the novel is to re-open the whole question of the de- 
vices and subterfuges of the novel in their relation 
to the integrity of the whole; to re-open it as a sub- 
ordinate phase of our other inclusive question, the 
relation of art to life. Only with the ascendancy of 
naturalism did the novel attain any philosophy of 
art to speak of ; and it is only with the attainment of 
a philosophy of art that the novel makes its transition 
from artifice to truth — stops asking "What will be 
effective, how can the attention be won and stimu- 
lated?" and begins to ask "How best can truth be 
served, the nature of things unravelled?" I do not 
mean of course that the matter of pure strategy in the 
novel can be ignored, for if the story does not capture 
our interest it can certainly do nothing to us at all: 
but the emphasis becomes transferred from one of 
these questions to the other, and the question of 
technique in the novel is being elevated along with 
the purpose and meaning of the novel as a whole. 

In one way it may even be said that questions of 
technique become all the while more important and 
more exacting ; for the modern notion of truth-telling 



242 THE MODERN NOVEL 

cuts off all those resources of palpable contrivance in 
technique upon which so much of the plot-interest 
depends in Fielding and Dickens. And the result is 
that the modern practitioner must have, in one par- 
ticular at least, a fuller equipment than these; for 
he must know how to win and hold the interest with- 
out such aids through the historical, the conventional, 
and simply by the amount and value of the truth he 
finds to tell. This elevation of the whole problem 
of expedients and devices in the novel means, as I 
have said, the substitution of a higher unity for a 
lower. Unity of purpose takes the place once held by 
the unity of trickery and elaborate organization. It 
would hardly be an exaggeration to say that natural- 
ism makes the same difference in the novel as in our 
conception of the world: it replaces arbitrary crea- 
tion by the organic evolution of a thing which grows 
into certain forms by its own inward nature, as it 
were by a kind of self-compulsion. 

It would be interesting but futile to speculate how 
far and with what consistency these changes could 
have been followed out in the novel without Con- 
tinental influences. The history of these changes 
since George Eliot is, as a fact, largely an affair of 
comparative literature ; for it is evident that the novel 
in France and, presently, the novel in Eussia did 
incalculably much to furnish both the ideal and the 
means. 

So far as I can express the difference between these 
two influences, it lies in the more fundamental sim- 
plicity and naivete of the Russian masters, the more 



DESIGN 243 



sophisticated and more technical proficiency of the 
French. It is as though the French had achieved 
unity as a purely artistic triumph, because of a com- 
pulsion to exhaust the possibilities of order, sym- 
metry, and austere perfection as things desirable and 
matchless in themselves; whereas the Russians 
achieved it through a compelling need of reducing 
everything to an elemental simplicity, for the sake 
of getting outside it, mastering it : one feels the Rus- 
sian temperament as less various and more strong, 
more tenacious and less nimble. While Flaubert and 
Maupassant were achieving unity by whittling down 
their subject to essentials, ruling out all that failed to 
contribute to its predetermined harmony, Turgenev 
and Dostoevski were achieving unity by relating their 
larger masses of data to some central and magnetic 
principle of truth. The French temper is to pick and 
choose, and then weave carefully the chosen elements 
together into a pattern; the Russian temper is to 
take everything there is to take, and put it into a 
single basket large and strong enough to carry it all. 
And so, while the '70 ? s and '80 's saw British novel- 
ists learning something of their technique in France, 
it also saw them learning perhaps even more of the 
rationale of technique in Russia. Mr. Howell s and 
Henry James, greatly as they were soon to differ in 
their use of what they learned, did beyond question, 
learn much, and derive a permanent impetus in cer- 
tain modem directions, first from Balzac, and then 
from Turgenev — to name only the most representa- 
tive of influences. 



244 THE MODERN NOVEL 

The distinction between French and Russian art 
is perhaps not so absolute as I have made it sound: 
what distinction ever is so absolute as one's account 
of it? But there is, I think, a measurable truth in 
my general point, that the Russian character has the 
greater capacity for obsession, the greater need to see 
all reality for the time being through a single pair 
of spectacles, the greater capacity to be interested in 
everything. And what I wish mainly to point out 
is this: that by the middle '90 's, when one of these 
Continental influences was at its culmination and the 
other was at least beginning to exert its leverage, 
then, in the decade when the names now most ac- 
credited were just beginning to appear on title-pages, 
the modern novel in English had pretty well deter- 
mined its present bent toward the Russian largeness, 
the Russian inclusiveness. Our younger novelists had 
learned from France certain of the fine fitnesses of 
treatment, of order; they had learned from Russia, 
through France, to practise these upon larger and 
more specialized pieces of subject matter than the 
French masters since Victor Hugo have commonly 
treated. 

That, on the whole, this choice of emphasis between 
two influences has resulted to the advantage of the 
novel, I may perhaps suggest by bare statement of 
two considerations: first, that the Russian inclusive- 
ness of matter and of event is most like the Victorian 
inclusiveness which is our chief tradition in the novel, 
so that full adoption of the French method and ideal 
might have meant, relatively, the impoverishment of 



DESIGN 245 



the novel ; secondly, that the largest possible inter- 
pretation of what is relevant to the subject of a novel 
best serves our modern notion of life's complexity, 
and gives the novelist his best chance of seeing life 
steadily and whole. In 1895 British fiction had its 
choice of whether it should see highly specialized 
specimens of life and make of each a perfect picture, 
or consider highly representative and typical speci- 
mens of life and see them with a single eye. The 
problem was unity by selection versus unity by in- 
terpretation. Our novelists mainly chose to interpret 
large segments of the typical; and on the whole the 
developments in the form of the novel during the 
twenty years since that choice crystallized have shown 
that they did well. 



Ill 



Suppose we consider separately, for a moment, these 
two lessons which the English novel was trying to 
learn in the last quarter-century of Victoria's reign — 
the French lesson of unity through internal fitness or 
congruity, the Eussian lesson of unity through the 
insistence upon a centralizing and directing purpose. 
Of the details of that first lesson learned in Paris, 
we can name and illustrate three of some technical 
importance. 

The first is oneness of tone or pitch — the necessity 
of keying all the parts of a given subject within an 
emotional gamut which does no violence to the read- 
er's sensibilities. If we desire an interesting example 



246 THE MODERN NOVEL 

of work performed under the most conscientious and 
single-minded zeal for such oneness, we have it in 
Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch's completion of Stevenson's 
unfinished St, Ives — a task executed with such loving 
circumspection that one can not tell, by internal evi- 
dence, where the break occurs. That Stevenson would 
have appreciated this beautiful competence shown in 
imitation of his style is proved by his sensitiveness 
to every one of his own failures adequately to imitate 
himself. Speaking of an earlier and slighter work, 
Prince Otto, he says in a letter to C. W. Stoddard: 

"How does your class get along? If you like to 
touch on Otto, any day in a by-hour, you may tell 
them — as the author's last dying confession — that it 
is a strange example of the difficulty of being ideal 
in an age of realism; that the unpleasant giddy- 
mindedness, which spoils the book and often gives it 
a wanton air of unreality and juggling with air- 
bells, comes from unsteadiness of key; from the too 
great realism of some chapters and passages — some 
of which I have now spotted, others I dare say I 
shall never spot — which disprepares the imagination 
for the cast of the remainder. 

"Any story can be made true in its own key: any 
story can be made false by the choice of a wrong key 
of detail or style : Otto is made to reel like a drunken 
— I was going to say man, but let us substitute 
cipher — by the variations of the key. ' ' 1 

In this informal comment Stevenson, a Scott with 

iThe Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vol. II, p. 321. 
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1911. 



DESIGN 247 



a French artistic conscience, proves how unquestion- 
ingly he assumed that the modern sense for unity of 
texture is necessary, not only to realism, but also to 
work done in a romantic tradition. There is a kind 
of story which, if it is to exist at all, demands that 
the hero shall be invulnerable; there is a kind of 
modern costume romance in which it is strictly proper 
that the last chapter shall show the hero converted to 
the religion of the majority. Perhaps one does better 
not to write that kind of romance; but if one does 
write it one must keep it in tune with itself, even at 
the cost of admitting conventions which are in them- 
selves silly. In their own irresponsible realm, the 
coincidences and mystifications of Wilkie Collins are 
not only justifiable but inevitable; The Woman in 
White and The Moonstone may not be fiction of a 
high order, but they are at least consistent with them- 
selves, and works of art in so far as they are of their 
own kind. In short, there is no art without form; 
and, for modern purposes, form is fusion. 

This general truth becomes still more manifest as I 
approach a second and more specific agent of unity, 
the single point of view. It is not enough that the 
material reported upon be consonant with itself: it 
must harmonize with the person who reports it, 
whether that person be the author himself reporting 
omnisciently, — a method which obviously suffers from 
lack of verisimilitude, since no one can reasonably be 
expected to know all the facts or be everywhere at 
once, — or an observer created by the author expressly 
to observe, or a character in the story. The omniscient 



248 THE MODERN NOVEL 

method tends to disappear, as we should expect it to 
in a period when the novelist finds his reward in the 
meanings of facts rather than in knowledge of the 
facts themselves. We no longer see the novelist 
"stand about in his scene, talking it over with his 
hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and 
spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art 
resides, " 1 as Mr. Howells says of Thackeray 's and 
Trollope's habit of personally conducting the story. 
The novelist who can be in all places at once and fol- 
low simultaneous actions going on apart from each 
other is too palpably the inventor of his facts; and, 
as a result of this feeling about him, we see the sub- 
plot practically disappear from modern fiction, and 
the action reduce itself to so much as can be compre- 
hended from a single human point of view working 
under the ordinary human limitations. We are in- 
terested, not in the mechanism of complex actions, but 
in the moral causes and effects of actions as shown in 
a life or a few lives followed continuously. The cul- 
mination of this interest thus far appears in the later 
novels and tales of Henry James, all of which are 
interpreted for us through the observing consciousness 
of some person, not the author, who is present in the 
story. To these we may add the more recent prac- 
tice of the direct colloquial method in some of the 
best work of Mr. Joseph Conrad. 

Thirdly, the modern craftsman has learned that 
there must be fusion among the various agents of the 

i Criticism and Fiction, p. 76. New York: Harper & Bros. 
MDCCCXCIII. 



DESIGN 249 



narrative process — the talk and action, the portrait- 
painting and characterization, which go to make up 
the actual written story. We have learned that the 
one of these elements which predominated in the 
earlier Victorians and in Scott, and which has latterly 
threatened to reduce our magazine fiction to a bare 
skeleton of dialogue — we have learned that the ele- 
ment of talk is the thinnest, most meagre of all in real 
and lasting communicativeness. Even when talk is 
sifted down to the printable economy and compact- 
ness, we require a bushel of it to convey what the 
novelist's own interpretation of his facts can give us 
in a tenth of the room; and the narrator whose 
dialogue is his principal stock-in-trade is not only 
copying the merits of the drama in conditions where 
they become positive defects, but he is also crowding 
out "the golden blocks themselves of the structure" — 
his own weighed, condensed, and reflective analysis. 
This complaint is one that Henry James, whose sense 
for such things was of the most subtly critical, had 
often to urge as his principal criticism of Mr. 
Howells 's technique ; and in one of his London Notes x 
he urged it with even more force against the decidedly 
inferior dialogue of Gissing. 

This third point is interestingly argued by Scott 
in his Preface to The Bride of Lammermoor, in an 
imaginary conversation between Pattieson the novel- 
ist and Dick Tinto the painter. Scott inclined on the 
whole to Pattieson 's view of talk as against descrip- 

i Notes on Novelists, pp. 441-43. New York: Charles 
Scribner's Sons. 1914. 



250 THE MODERN NOVEL 

tion; but the modern artist, who has more reasons 
than Scott had for wishing to weave a firm pattern, 
and no reasons for wishing to weave one of loose ends, 
agrees almost completely with Tinto. — 

" 'Your characters,' he said, 'my dear Pattieson, 
make too much use of the gob box; they patter too 
much' — an elegant phraseology, which Dick had 
learned while painting the scenes of an itinerant com- 
pany of players — * there is nothing in whole pages but 
mere chat and dialogue.' 

" 'The ancient philosopher,' said I in reply, 'was 
wont to say, ' ' Speak, that I may know thee ' ' ; and how 
is it possible for an author to introduce his persona 
dramatis to his readers in a more interesting and ef- 
fectual manner, than by the dialogue in which each 
is represented as supporting his own appropriate char- 
acter?' 

" 'It is a false conclusion,' said Tinto; 'I hate it, 
Peter, as I hate an unfilled cann. I will grant you, 
indeed, that speech is a faculty of some value in the 
intercourse of human affairs, and I will not even 
insist on the doctrine of that Pythagorean toper, who 
was of opinion that, over a bottle, speaking spoiled 
conversation. But I will not allow that a professor 
of the fine arts has occasion to embody the idea of his 
scene in language, in order to impress upon the 
reader its reality and its effect. On the contrary, I 
will be judged by most of your readers, Peter, should 
these tales ever become public, whether you have not 
given us a page of talk for every single idea which 



DESIGN 251 



two words might have communicated, while the pos- 
ture, and manner, and incident, accurately drawn, 
and brought out by appropriate colouring, would have 
preserved all that was worthy of preservation, and 
saved these everlasting said he's and said she's, with 
which it has been your pleasure to encumber your 
pages. ' 

"I replied, 'That he confounded the operations of 
the pencil and the pen ; that the serene and silent art, 
as painting has been called by one of our first living 
poets, necessarily appealed to the eye, because it had 
not the organs for addressing the ear ; whereas poetry, 
or that species of composition which approached to 
it, lay under the necessity of doing absolutely the 
reverse, and addressed itself to the ear, for the pur- 
pose of exciting that interest which it could not at- 
tain through the medium of the eye.' 

"Dick was not a whit staggered by my argument, 
which he contended was founded on misrepresenta- 
tion. ' Description,' he said, 'was to the author of a 
romance exactly what drawing and tinting were to 
a painter; words were his colours, and, if properly 
employed, they could not fail to place the scene, 
which he wished to conjure up, as effectually before 
the mind's eye, as the tablet or canvas presents it to 
the bodily organ. The same rules,' he contended, 
'applied to both, and an exuberance of dialogue, in 
the former case, was a verbose and laborious mode of 
composition which went to confound the proper art of 
fictitious narrative with that of the drama, a widely 



252 THE MODERN NOVEL 

different species of composition, of which dialogue 
was the very essence, because all, excepting the 
language to be made use of, was presented to the eye 
by the dresses', and persons, and actions of the per- 
formers upon the stage. But as nothing,' said Dick, 
1 can be more dull than a long narrative written upon 
the plan of a drama, so where you have approached 
most near to that species of composition, by indulging 
in prolonged scenes of mere conversation, the course 
of your story has become chill and constrained, and 
you have lost the power of arresting the attention 
and exciting the imagination, in which upon other 
occasions you may be considered as having succeeded 
tolerably well.' 

"I made my bow in requital of the compliment, 
which was probably thrown in by way of placebo, and 
expressed myself willing at least to make one trial 
of a more straightforward style of composition, in 
which my actors should do more, and say less, than 
in my former attempts of this kind. . . . " 1 

Scott's use of this last concession in The Bride of 
Lammermoor, where he seems really to make a con- 
scious attempt at repairing the proportions of his 
earlier work, may go farther than is commonly per- 
ceived toward accounting for the peculiar distinction 
of this most lyrical of his tales; though it still re- 
mains odd that Scott could be on the whole so in- 
different a practitioner of that which he so shrewdly 
perceived and argued. 

i From the "Preliminary" of the Introduction to The Bride 
of Lammermoor. 



DESIGN 253 



IV 



So far I speak of a general ideal of craftsmanship 
which is more French than English, and of some of 
its practical effects on English fiction. Now let us 
see what was the general effect of the Russians. We 
shall find it to have been sweeping; for it resulted 
in the creation of a strikingly new form in fiction, a 
form which we may take the risk of calling the novel 
of the future. At all events it is the novel of the 
present, and decidedly not the novel of the past. It 
is a form which has evolved, not from the novel alone, 
but from the novel and the short story — both assimi- 
lated in a certain way under the mediation of some 
modern ideas, and under the intervention, as it seems 
to me, of direct influences from Russia. 

The novel of the past, as we know, formed itself by 
an ideal of dramatic structure, with a crisis at or 
after the middle — at all events far enough from the 
end so that there could be a definite change of direc- 
tion in the plot. That is, the crisis served as a new 
initial impulse, from which the action proceeded un- 
der changed conditions to its end. Romola, which I 
have named already in a different connection, is an 
orthodox example of the dramatic structure carried 
out on a vast scale. Romola 's life of struggle pro- 
ceeds in a certain direction and toward certain ends 
until the events which involve the deaths of her hus- 
band and her god-father and her flight from the 
city; then it proceeds in an entirely different direc- 



254 THE MODERN NOVEL 

tion through the stages of her effort to re-plan her 
life and make a new place for herself. This is the 
general contour of the older conventional novel, as of 
the drama; and the short story differs from it chiefly 
in that it has no change of direction, but follows its 
theme straightforwardly to a crisis which is also the 
end. The older novel was two stories, or a story and 
its sequel ; the short story is one story, cumulative in 
its effect. 

The new novel is a sublimated short story. It avails 
itself of the novel 's fulness of treatment ; it may run 
to any length, even the inordinate length of the Vic- 
torian novels; but its theme is single, and it aims at 
rigid unity of effect — the unity which comes of one 
direction inexorably followed, and the use of all the 
material to illustrate a single principle. It replaces 
contrast and suspense with intensive thoroughness and 
the strict logic of causal succession. It is the short 
story under a microscope, the short story on a vastly 
enlarged scale. Henry James, an avowed disciple of 
Turgenev, was the first to practise this form in Eng- 
lish; Mrs. Wharton, his disciple, has continued it; 
Conrad, whose literary kinships are of the Continent, 
has given it enlargement and several new character- 
istics; and our bookshelves are being filled with new 
works of extraordinary formal merit, and in length 
from 40,000 to 200,000 words, which prove on analysis 
to be, not novels of the older dramatic figuration, but 
short stories or novelle of the most rigid specializa- 
tion in a single phase of life or character. The ma- 
terial of a novel may be- present ; but the purpose is 



DESIGN 255 



to exhaust the meaning of a single issue, not to range 
freely over the whole complexity of life. 

Mr. Howells, whose mind has always turned with 
interest toward the arts as they are practised in 
Europe, despite the strong and sane provincialism of 
his own creative work, recognized these tendencies 
more than a quarter of a century ago, and was pretty 
directly writing of them when he said : 

"... each man is a microcosm, and the writer 
who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a 
dozen people, or the conditions of a neighbourhood 
or a class, has done something which cannot in any 
bad sense be called narrow ; his breadth is vertical in- 
stead of lateral, that is all; and this depth is more 
desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization 
like ours, where the differences are not of classes, but 
of types, and not of types either so much as of char- 
acters. A new method was necessary in dealing with 
the new conditions, and the new method is world- 
wide, because the whole world is more or less Ameri- 
canized. Tolstoi is exceptionally voluminous among 
modern writers, even Russian writers; and it might 
be said that the forte of Tolstoi himself is not in his 
breadth sidewise, but in his breadth upward and 
downward. The Death of Ivan Mitch leaves as vast 
an impression on the reader's soul as any episode of 
War and Peace, which, indeed, can be recalled only 
in episodes, and not as a whole. I think that our 
writers may be safely counselled to continue their 
work in the modern way, because it is the best way 
yet known. If they make it true, it will be large, no 



256 THE MODERN NOVEL 

matter what its superficies are; and it would be the 
greatest mistake to try to make it big. A big book 
is necessarily a group of episodes more or less loosely 
connected by a thread of narrative, and there seems 
no reason why this thread must always be supplied. 
Each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one 
of a connected group ; the final effect will be from the 
truth of each episode, not from the size of the 
group." 1 

The effect of this kind of intensive specialization 
is a singular and most amazing rebirth in imaginative 
literature of something very like the classical unities 
of time, place, and action. The unities as they were 
observed in classic drama and in neo-classic imitations 
justified themselves in aesthetics and were employed 
primarily for aesthetic reasons; they served the work 
which obeyed them, not as agents of a closer contact 
with the real life of men and women, but as agents 
of an inward and self-sufficient harmony in the work 
itself. Marlowe and Shakspere, when they cast aside 
the unities in order to get nearer to life, were freeing 
art from the shackles of convention. But the modern 
artist has got round to the beginning of the cycle; 
we see in him the unities recovered and reconstituted, 
though for different reasons and in a new spirit. He 
tells one story and one only because he wants to get 
to the bottom of something, not because of any 
fancied ideal of artistic symmetry; he takes a short 
and continuous stretch of time because he wants to 

i Criticism <md Fiction, 142-43. New York: Harper & Bros. 
MDCCCXCIII. 



DESIGN 257 



preserve unbroken the chain of causality in his ac- 
tion, not because he thinks the flight of time in the 
work of art should match the flight of time in real 
events; he keeps his scene narrowed and single be- 
cause he wants to correlate man causally with his 
environment, not because he considers a change of 
scene inherently inartistic. The reasons are different ; 
but the result, in concentration, in focus, is strikingly 
the same. This change in the shape of the novel, a 
change brought about by new ideas and a new pur- 
pose, constitutes the superiority of the modern novel 
as a form over any other large unit of imaginative 
expression whatever; and it is one of the principal 
reasons for hoping that genius of the future will find 
more to facilitate, and less to impede, its utterance 
than it has ever found. 



Have I seemed thus far to be slighting the purpose 
and meaning of fiction in favour of its subordinate 
means and methods? To do so has been far from 
my intention : I have wanted to speak of these lesser 
things just in so far as they are governed by the 
greater, and to treat the form of the novel only as it 
is ruled by the spirit. If I have not succeeded 
before this point in showing that our modern way 
of writing novels is a natural outcome of our 
modern way of looking at life, I shall have done so 
when I have noted once more that the service of de- 



258 THE MODERN NOVEL 

sign or technique is to help fiction represent life — 
not to copy it, or idealize it, or prove something about 
it, or make a substitute for it, but to represent it. 
Just as the details of an artist's subject are chosen to 
represent the whole subject, to stand for more than 
they are, so the whole subject is chosen to represent 
as much as may be of life. Other things equal, the 
worth of a piece of fiction is proportioned to its wide- 
ness or wealth of reference. The more it stands for, 
the more it is, even though it be slight in itself. And 
shall we not say that the purpose of modern technique, 
which has on the whole the effect of curtailing the 
subject-matter of the individual story, is to extend and 
amplify the meaning of the story, and, through thor- 
oughness of treatment, to make the artist 's little stand 
for more than ever? That economy of means and 
material should have led to enlargement of the repre- 
sentational power of the novel seems to me to be the 
most significant of recent general results in fiction. 
It is worth while, I think, to make room here for 
three examples of that result. Let the first be Mr. 
Hardy's Return of the Native, one of the most power- 
ful novels of localized "atmosphere" in any language. 
The motif is set in an opening chapter, "A Face on 
which Time makes but Little Impression/ ' a descrip- 
tion of Egdon Heath, the barren waste in which the 
action takes place. This motif dominates the whole 
tale. As on the heath, so in the souls of the char- 
acters, and especially in the soul of the heroine, 
Eustacia Vye Yeobright, night and day wrestle to- 
gether in a sort of interminable twilight. The in- 



DESIGN 259 



scrutable face of nature throughout the book is used 
to symbolize Mr. Hardy 's view of the inscrutable way 
of the cosmos with the whole human species; man's 
daily life in a natural scene which is and must remain 
a riddle to him is subtly suggestive of our common life 
in an immensity which we can neither understand nor 
change; and the changelessness of that indifferent and 
mocking face of nature, which neither smiles nor 
frowns while men and women play for a moment 
their puny parts under its fixed gaze before they are 
swallowed into it, is an image of the eternal futility 
which Hardy saw as perhaps the one unifying reality 
of our common life. This is not symbolism, and it is 
not allegory : it is suggestion used to the end of repre- 
sentation on the grandest scale. It weaves a phil- 
osophy of the whole into the patterned history of a 
handful of lives. 

My other two examples, both pre-eminent novels of 
the first decade of this century, bring us to the 
threshold of the present. As unlike as possible from 
each other in substance and in minor points of tech- 
nique, they are alike in that the masses of subject- 
matter of each are invoked by a single principle and 
dedicated to its illustration. In each instance, the 
principle is a large truth about life. Mr. Arnold Ben- 
nett's Old Wives' Tale has on the surface as defiant 
a breach of unity as a novel could well contain; for 
there are two heroines of widely different and widely 
sundered lives, in large part separately observed and 
recorded. But there is a unity which comes out of 
this disjunction, and it is this : the life of Constance 



260 THE MODERN NOVEL 

and the life of Sophia, separate and unlike as they 
are, arrive ultimately at an equal and a similar un- 
derstanding of what life is. Life is something that 
we never understand until we have lived it ; and when 
we have lived it we see that it is something which we 
could never have lived at all if we had understood 
it first. That, says Mr. Bennett, is our common lot 
and the ultimate wisdom ; and it is a triumphant illus- 
tration of the modern kind of unity in purpose and 
effect that he should have brought so large a sense of 
community out of material inherently so scattered, so 
little subjected to the other and lesser modern prac- 
tices of economy. 

Mr. Conrad's Nostromo is likewise a vindication of 
unity through principle and purpose, in defiance of 
technical regulations which are useful in their place. 
Here is a story of which, materially speaking, the very 
mainspring is romance — a story of a misgoverned 
tropical republic of the New World, with a silver- 
mine arid a horde of pirates, with revolution and coun- 
ter-revolution and any number of violent deeds and 
thrilling rescues, as its principal machinery. It is the 
representational use of all this that turns it into 
realism. For the country of the tale, Costaguana, 
is the modern world in symbolic miniature; and the 
triumph of the mine of silver over a group of in- 
dividuals, some of whom loathe it and some covet, some 
of whom it drives to perjury, to treason, to murder, 
others of whom it despoils through its tragic effects 
on those whom they love — this triumph of the precious 
metal is the ascendancy of material interests in mod- 



DESIGN 261 



era. life, the tyranny of the economic, the corrosion 
of greed, the downfall of the idealist through his per- 
sonal dependence on those whom material interests 
can corrupt or destroy. Nostromo is a pageant and 
an epic of a civilization founded on commerce; and 
if half its greatness is in its mastery of the immediate 
facts, at least we may say that the other half is in the 
sweep and clarity of its synthetic representation of a 
good share of modern existence in a world whose most 
cherished precept is to buy in the cheapest and sell 
in the dearest market. 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 



Throughout this series of discussions of the pur- 
pose and the meaning of fiction I have had a great deal 
to say about such things as the author's attitude toward 
his work, the status of fiction in this generation and 
that, and the general evolution of the novel upward ; 
but I have taken hardly any notice of the correspond- 
ing changes which must have occurred in the reader 
of fiction, if the novel has achieved anything of its 
real purpose. I have dealt with the more and more 
truth, the higher and higher kind of truth, which the 
novelist is always putting into his writing: now let 
me deal with the amount and kind of truth which the 
reader must, in justice, get out of his reading. 

We have seen, if my account has attained any 
coherence, that the evolution of the novel has been an 
affair of struggle between opposed forces, and that 
the struggle has constantly been shifted to a higher 
and higher plane, every bit of ground won represent- 
ing a new ideal for the shape or the spirit of the 
novel, or for both. First came the struggle between 
the method of extravagant fancy and the method of 
realism of circumstance; and the novel won truth to 
fact. Then came the struggle between satire and the 
scientific attitude; and the novel achieved its present 
realism of spirit, its truth to the nature of things. 
The whole trend throughout these stages is from ir- 

265 



266 THE MODERN NOVEL 

responsibility toward responsibility, or, as I said, from 
a lower and more personal conception of truth to a 
higher and more impersonal. 

Now, it is my present point that this brief history 
of what has happened to the novel is also a brief 
implied history of what must have happened to the 
reader. If^we leave out the baser demands of the 
commercial market, which always remain about the 
same except for superficial vogues, and which almost 
automatically create the supplies they desire, it re- 
mains pretty true — at least truer than in almost any 
other kind of transaction — that the supply of fiction 
creates the demand. The novelist not only serves his 
public: to a large extent he makes it, and makes it 
after his own kind. And it seems on the whole a true 
generalization that the less responsible fiction of the 
time, roughly, before 1860 sought and found a less 
responsible reader, the more responsible fiction since 
that time a more responsible reader. We know that 
only within forty years or thereabout has the reading 
of fiction become completely respectable; and that 
means that the aim of the novel has become elevated, 
which means in turn that it finds its mark in a better 
and better part of the reading population. The sort 
of person who read history, biography, and memoirs 
a half century ago, and by no means novels, reads 
novels now as a quite natural recourse. I am not at 
this moment debating whether the change is good for 
him : but it is certainly a good thing for the novel, and 
indicative of its gradual self-improvement, that the 
reader who had nothing to do with it in the last 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 267 

generation could hardly do without it in this. The 
change means, to put it shortly, that once upon a 
time the truth-loving person read fiction, if at all, 
without reference to his love of truth, in order to / 
forget, to take "a moral holiday," to be "taken out 
of himself"; whereas now he can read fiction precisely 
to intensify and reward his love of truth, however 
exacting that may be. Fiction once offered, princi- 
pally, amusement or diversion through escape from 
responsibility; now it offers, at least the best of it 
does, the pleasure of responsibility understood, ac- 
cepted, and welcomed. 

Naturally I do not mean that the great novelists of 
the past failed on the whole to tell truth, or that their 
readers failed to find truth in them. A great artist 
is, almost by definition, a person who sees that on the 
whole truth is more entertaining than falsification. 
But they worked, those great novelists, quite frankly 
under the ideal of entertainment, as we see by the 
places where their work does not ring true. Those 
are invariably the places where they thought they 
saw a clash between truth to human nature and di- 
version for the reader. Where they thought a pretty 
lie would please the reader better than the restraint 
of sober verity, there is no conflict at all — they tell 
the pretty lie. Whereas now they would tell the 
sober verity; and the reader — this is the important 
point of difference — would accept it as conveying more 
and better pleasure than the pretty lie. The modern 
reader who is worth writing for does not readily 
pardon his realist for turning sentimentalist. 



268 THE MODERN NOVEL 

This change in the novel-writer, and in the reader's 
requirement, was expressed inimitably by Mr. Howells 
a quarter of a century ago in some passages about the 
tradition of the holiday story as written by Dickens 
and others. There is no doubting the genuineness of 
Dickens's literary conscience, judging it by the high- 
est standards extant in his time: yet any common 
reader of 1918 can see the tinsel in what Dickens's 
public took for gold. Says Mr. Howells, after noting 
that it was Dickens who " rescued Christmas from 
Puritan distrust, and humanized it and consecrated 
it to the hearts and homes of all": 

"Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in 
working his miracle, but there is no doubt about his 
working it. One opens his Christmas stories in this 
later day — The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted 
Man, The Cricket on the Hearth, and all the rest — 
and with 'a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,' asks 
himself for the preternatural virtue that they once 
had. The pathos appears false and strained; the 
humour largely horse-play; the character theatrical; 
the joviality pumped ; the psychology commonplace ; 
the sociology alone funny. It is a world of real 
clothes, earth, air, water, and the rest; the people 
often speak the language of life, but their motives 
are as disproportioned and improbable, and their pas- 
sions and purposes as overcharged, as those of the 
worst of Balzac's people." And again, in droll and 
specific irony on some particular ingredients of the 
Christmas tradition in stories : — 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 269 

". . . the Christmas season is meteorologically . . . 
favourable to the effective return of persons long 
supposed lost at sea, or from a prodigal life, or from 
a darkened mind. The longer, denser, and colder 
nights are better adapted to the apparition of ghosts, 
and to all manner of signs and portents; while they 
seem to present a wider field for the active interven- 
tion of angels in behalf of orphans and outcasts. 
The dreams of elderly sleepers at this time are apt 
to be such as will effect a lasting change in them 
when they awake, turning them from the hard, cruel, 
and grasping habits of a life-time, and reconciling 
them to their sons, daughters, and nephews, who have 
thwarted them in marriage ; or softening them to their 
meek, uncomplaining wives, whose hearts they have 
trampled upon in their reckless pursuit of wealth; 
and generally disposing them to a distribution of 
hampers among the sick and poor, and to a friendly 
reception of chubby gentlemen with charity subscrip- 
tion papers. Ships readily drive upon rocks in the 
early twilight, and offer exciting difficulties of sal- 
vage; and the heavy snows gather thickly round the 
steps of wanderers who lie down to die in them pre- 
paratory to their discovery and rescue by immediate 
relatives. The midnight weather is also very suit- 
able to encounter with murderers and burglars; and 
the contrast of its freezing gloom with the light and 
cheer indoors promotes the gaieties which merge, at 
all well-regulated country-houses, in love and mar- 
riage, In the region of pure character no moment 



270 THE MODERN NOVEL 

could be so available for flinging off the mask of 
frivolity, or imbecility, or savagery, which one has 
worn for ten or twenty long years, say, for the purpose 
of foiling some villain, and surprising the reader, and 
helping the author out with his plot. Persons abroad 
in the Alps, or Apennines, or Pyrenees, or anywhere 
seeking shelter in the huts of shepherds or the dens 
of smugglers, find no time like it for lying in a feigned 
slumber, and listening to the whispered machinations 
of their suspicious-looking entertainers, and then sud- 
denly starting up and fighting their way out ; or else 
springing from the real sleep into which they have 
sunk exhausted, and finding it broad day and the 
good peasants whom they had so unjustly doubted, 
waiting breakfast for them. We need not point out 
the superior advantages of the Christmas season for 
anything one has a mind to do with the French Revolu- 
tion, or the Arctic explorations, or the Indian Mutiny, 
or the horrors of Siberian exile ; there is no time so 
good for the use of this material; and ghosts on 
shipboard are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In 
our own logging camps the man who has gone into the 
woods for the winter, after quarrelling with his wife, 
then hears her sad appealing voice, and is moved to 
good resolutions as at no other period of the year; 
and in the mining regions, first in California and 
later in Colorado, the hardened reprobate, dying in 
his boots, smells his mother's doughnuts, and breathes 
his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and 
the little brother, or sister, or the old father coming 
to meet him from heaven ; while his rude companions 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 271 

listen round him, and dry their eyes on the butts of 
their revolvers. ' ' x 

This material and this spirit hardly please the least 
critical of us now. Do not such facts prove that the 
conscience of art has changed for the better, and with 
it the conscience of the reader, and that both have 
become more like the conscience of ordinary self- 
respecting intercourse? 



II 



" Intercourse ' ' is, I think, a happy word for the 
newer relation between the writer of stories and his 
public — especially if one recall the high sense given 
that word by Stevenson in his essay on "Truth of 
Intercourse." We conceive the artist as a fellow- 
citizen with the gift of profitable utterance, instead of 
as a hired public performer for hours of relaxation. 
We elevate him, in short, to the rank of a fellow- 
worker. 

It is perhaps worth while to note that this new atti- 
tude, which gives the artist a more natural place 
among us and stresses his likeness to ourselves instead 
of his differences, is a return part way to what must 
have been the original idea of his function. The 
primitive artist was a spokesman of many, their 
voice and expression ; his task it was to interpret them 
to themselves, as they drew together for battle or 
celebration, mourning or festival. He was the com- 

i Criticism and Fiction, pp. 175-76; 163-66. New York: 
Harper & Bros. MDCCCXCIII. 



272 THE MODERN NOVEL 

posite consciousness of the people given an articulate 
voice. When national or racial unity declined, his 
function became non-integral; and his continued ex- 
istence became dependent on the favour of some in- 
dividual patron who supported him. In the second 
stage the artist was owned by an individual, as a 
sort of rare exhibit whose existence conferred distinc- 
tion on the owner. About the time of Dr. Samuel 
Johnson's famous declaration of independence, this 
long stage of patronage and fulsome dedications gave 
way to a third, much more difficult to describe, much 
more tenable for a self-respecting workman, but still 
of limited and imperfect dignity. In this third stage 
the relation of patronage continued, only the whole 
book-buying public took the place of the individual 
benefactor. This conjoint ownership of a writer by 
a whole people — one sees it in the mid-Victorian Eng- 
lish attitude toward Dickens — involves the idea that 
the artist is a queer being with an incomprehensible 
knack of giving people something they want; an 
amazing prodigy of nature whom the public takes 
pride in owning and exhibiting, but whom it does 
not feel in the least obliged to understand provided it 
pays him, and whom it would not greatly care to 
resemble. The artist of this period is like a freak in 
a circus, whom people pay to stare at, or like an ex- 
pensive entertainer who can be "had in" for the 
evening, but whom no one would dream of having as 
a guest. 

To a certain extent it is true that we are still in 
this third stage ; one sees a relic of it in the popular 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 273 

feeling that an author must continue to emulate his 
first successes. We felt abused and taken advantage 
of when the late William De Morgan, who had pleased 
us with four striking novels in what we chose to call 
"his own vein," suddenly betrayed us into buying 
his fifth, novel, An Affair of Dishonor, written in an 
entirely different vein ; we begrudged him his techni- 
cal and legal right to be something more or something 
less than himself, to be the part of himself that we 
were not paying for. 

But, despite this instinctive tyranny of the public 
toward authors who have identified themselves with 
a particular sort of fiction, — or, as we put it in our 
crude commercial vernacular, a particular "line of 
goods," — one sees some hopeful signs of a fourth 
stage, more like the first, in which the artist shall be a 
self-respecting fellow-worker with the rest of us, 
judged by the much or little value of his intercourse 
with us, and willing, since it is necessary, to take the 
pay that comes from the social value of his work. 
This view of the artist, the only one which brings truth 
of intercourse to the front, is of course a product of 
our socialized view of everything. It is bound to be 
given an enormous impetus in a time like this, when 
unity of conscience is so quickened and intensified 
among great masses of men; for at such times, not 
only does the artist express what we want, interpret 
us to ourselves, and read for us the meaning of life 
and struggle and death better than the politician or 
the inarticulate soldier can do, but he also dies for 
us and with us. The young poets whose names this 



274 THE MODERN NOYEL 

war has added to the roll made illustrious by Sir 
Philip Sidney have done something for the place of 
the artist in our civilization; and Rupert Brooke 
buried in foreign soil on the hilltop of his ^Egean isle 
is perhaps doing as much for the reader of the future 
as Rupert Brooke writing: 

"If I should die, think only this of me : 
That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is for ever England." 

Hardly ever again, after the artist has shown himself 
as real in his living and dying as in his writing, can 
we go back to the patronizing system which sets him 
apart as a matinee idol — an impersonator and not a 
person. 

Ill 

All this change of attitude is the flat rejection of 
art as diversion merely, of art for escape. What we 
must ban and debar and obliterate is the wholly false 
notion that life and literature are two largely separate 
things that have least to do with each other. The 
man who writes a book- is living most fully while he 
does it ; it is a wholly false classification that says he 
is dealing in life at second-hand, while the man who 
penetrates the Arctic Circle or the sources of the 
Amazon is dealing in it at first-hand. A story is 
probably not worth writing unless it represents the 
writer's closest contact with living reality; and it is 
certainly not worth reading if it merely takes the 
reader divertingly "out of himself. " We speak of 



"ENTERTAIN M E N T" 275 

"the world of books," It seems to me an uncon- 
sciously cynical phrase, a tacit sneer — as though read- 
ing a book were an interlude in living, a gap in reality, 
while travelling seventy miles an hour or over-eating 
rich foods were "real"! A worthy book was writ- 
ten by somebody who was living more fully when he 
wrote it than nine-tenths of us ever live; and if we 
cannot read it in fulness of life, if we read it because 
we have "nothing to do," then, heaven help us, we 
are doddering in the wrong generation. 

What, then, is meant by the saying that ' ' The pur- 
pose of all art is to give pleasure?" Why, simply 
that we must give "pleasure" a large enough defini- 
tion. We must make it mean the pleasure of the 
right person, and the right person taken at the right 
time. Mr. Brownell speaks 1 of the readers who rest 
the whole justification of Edgar Allan Poe on his 
success in making their flesh creep. Doesn't he make 
one 's flesh creep ? they ask. Well, says Mr. Brownell, 
that depends entirely on whose flesh they are referring 
to. There are all sorts of pleasures ; and the sort of 
person who reacts decisively to the best is ordinarily 
left untouched by the less good. Sociologically, we 
are all agreed that the highest pleasures are not those 
which ' ' take us out of ourselves, ' ' but those which take 
us more deeply into ourselves and into each other ; not 
those which make us forget, but those which quicken 
and inspire remembrance. In other words, the high- 
est pleasures are the social emotions which come from 

i Essay on Edgar Allan Poe, in American Prose Masters. 
By W. C. Brownell. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
1909. 



276 THE MODERN NOVEL 

a rational and truthful view of our status as fellow- 
mortals — pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, fraternity, 
solidarity; the pleasures of " truth of intercourse." 
It is well to remind ourselves that the highest develop- 
ment of civilization is two or three men sitting in a 
room talking. 

This sense of community on which the great joys 
depend is recognized in all great art, and especially in 
the moral compensations of great tragedy. The social 
emotions of which I am speaking may often be merged 
with pain : every one of them demands at least a per- 
son with the capacity for generous pain. Most of 
them are compound of pain and pleasure. Pater 
speaks of "living at the point where all the highest 
sensations meet" ; the fully pleasured life is what it is 
because the pleasure is full, not because the pleasure 
is all of one kind. Any sort of self -discipline or re- 
nunciation converts a lower pleasure into a higher. 
The prototype of all such truisms is in David's words, 
' ' Can I drink the blood of my friends ? " as he pours 
the water on the ground, renouncing a sensual pleas- 
ure for a spiritual ; or in the words of a greater than 
David, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground 
and die, it abideth alone : but if it die, it bringeth forth 
much fruit." 

And — if I may be trivial again after being perhaps 
unduly serious — it is quite as true that the person 
who renounces the reading of silly books, or the read- 
ing of serious books in a silly frame of mind, is re- 
nouncing a low pleasure of self-gratification for a 
higher pleasure of self -development, and getting rid of 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 277 

a chocolate-cream philosophy for the sake of a sense 
of what life is really made of — which is the thing that 
real books are made of too. 



IV 



Of course no one means to deny fiction a reasonable 
self-indulgence in the matter of moral holidays. The 
Pipe-Smoker in one of Mr. Kenneth Grahame 's Pagan 
Papers speaks of cigarettes as being all very well 
''when you're not smoking"; and books there be too, 
ranging from those of Thomas Love Peacock to those 
of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, which are all very well when 
you're not reading. Every member of every one of 
the learned professions, and all writers and lecturers 
especially, must have many intervals of looking for- 
ward with intense relish to the blessed relief of having 
for a time no opinions to express, or even to hold ; and 
it is a notorious fact that every teacher of the young 
spends the month of May reviling his occupation and 
threatening to buy a farm. Was it Belfast in The 
Nigger of the "Narcissus" who, in the revulsion of 
feeling produced by such an accumulation of hard- 
ships as was the lot of seamen in ships that sailed, 
threatened to "chuck going to sea for ever and go in a 
steamer"? Anything, done hard enough and long 
enough, proves the advantage of doing it no more for 
a season, and of doing anything else whatever; but 
the implicit meaning of all vacations is that temporary 
irresponsibility is one kind of preparation for being 



278 THE MODERN NOVEL 

permanently responsible. It is work that gives a 
vacation all the meaning it can ever have. And the 
literature of pure diversion, likewise, derives its sense 
from its relation to the literature of interpretation. 
We read the literature of escape — often with a feeling 
that the function of the mere entertainer is in some 
sort a sacred one, a ministry — precisely because of 
everything that it is not ; thus tacitly admitting that 
it is an exception and not the norm. 

A book from which I have already quoted, Criticism 
and Fiction, puts the concession to irresponsibility 
into terms partly historical when it says : "lam not 
saying that what may be called the fantastic romance 
— the romance that descends from Frankenstein 
rather than The Scarlet Letter — ought not to be. On 
the contrary, I should grieve to lose it, as I should 
grieve to lose the pantomime or the comic opera, or 
many other graceful things that amuse the passing 
hour, and help us to live agreeably in a world where 
men actually sin, suffer, and die. ' ' x Note, though, 
how Mr. Howells goes on: "But it belongs to the 
decorative arts, and though it has a high place among 
them, it cannot be ranked with the works of the 
imagination — the works that represent and body forth 
human experience. Its ingenuity can always afford 
a refined pleasure, and it can often, at some risk to 
itself, convey a valuable truth. ' ' x 

It is the higher of these two implied kinds of pleas- 
ure that art must more and more steadfastly hold for 

i Criticism and Fiction, p. 116. By W. D. Howells. New 
York: Harper & Bros. MDCCCXCIII. 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 279 

its ideal. To be art at all, it must of course minister 
to pleasure; but there always remains the difference 
between getting out of life to seek pleasure and seek- 
ing to bring pleasure into life. One of the most dis- 
tinguished surgeons in America, and at eighty years 
one of the hardest- working men, objects to the the- 
oretically ideal day of eight hours to work, eight to 
play, and eight to sleep, on the ground that himself 
requires at least sixteen hours to play. No one sup- 
poses that work of any kind is all beer and skittles; 
at least no one does who has worked ;j and some there 
are who make a sad and labourious business even of do- 
ing nothing at all. But work must be done, somehow, 
on a basis of indomitable joy in it, and as our only 
possible means of self-expression in terms of life. 
And so must be done the work of the novelist. 

It is one of the distressing anomalies of the writ- 
er's life, and in fact one of the chief drawbacks to 
it, that the work which he does with joy is not re- 
ceived by the public, whatever the joy it gives them, 
as work. The sober business of his life is the excep- 
tion, the interlude, in theirs. The irony and the 
incongruity of this clash between the purpose of 
fiction and its meaning are expressed by a gifted 
contemporary writer in these terms: "The automo- 
bile and the telephone, the accomplishments of Mr. 
Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be permis- 
sible to add of Mr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, 
in one fashion or another, every moment of every 
living American's existence; whereas had America 
produced, instead, a second Milton or a Dante, it 



280 THE MODERN NOVEL 

would at most have caused a few of us to spend a few 
spare evenings rather differently, ' ' 1 Such a con- 
sideration is felt as belittling; even a writer who af- 
fects to despise the public which gives him his living 
must feel its interference with a kind of plain human 
dignity which we all like to have. It is a much more 
serious consideration than that raised by Stevenson 
in his famous "Letter to a Young Gentleman Propos- 
ing to Embrace the Career of Art." To win one's 
living by pleasure given to others is indeed a difficult 
sentence to accept, unless one have illimitable faith 
in the quality and the effectual value of the pleasure. 
But even the professional athlete is better off, in this 
one respect, than the professional story-teller: at 
least, what his public accepts from him is the same 
thing which he is paid to offer, and such dignity as 
he has does not suffer the affront of seeing his work 
daily misconstrued, taken for something else alto- 
gether. 

The general acceptance of fiction as a part of real 
life is a high and remote possibility, not an impos- 
sibility; and its very remoteness is a reinforcement 
of every reason why the novelist must hope and strive 
for it. There can certainly be no hope of a public 
better than the artist himself conceives and works 
for; and, as a fact, the changes already produced in 
the reader by the writer's greater and greater de- 
mands upon him are noteworthy enough to justify 
the hope that in this fundamental matter also the 

i The Certain Hour. By James Branch Cabell. New York: 
Robert M. McBride & Co. Auctorial Induction, p. 32. 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 281 

artist can, by being creative enough, make whatever 
kind of reader he needs. For example: Time was 
when work did not enter into the subject-matter of 
fiction. The characters lived exclusively to make the 
story; and if they were not leisured folk, then they 
were working folk taken in their hours of leisure. 
But for a generation past, the novel, except as written 
by Henry James, has dealt with busy folk in their 
hours of busyness. Its characters, instead of existing 
to live the story that the novelist wants to tell, re- 
quire him to write the story about them because they 
are really living. This one change in the make-up of 
fiction shows how our conception of pleasure has 
changed, from escape to voluntary self- immersion in 
the affairs of our fellows. And if this change could 
come about in our attitude toward the work about 
which the novelist writes, why can it not come about 
in our attitude toward the work which he himself 
does? 

All art looks forward, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, to the breaking-down of the distinctions be- 
tween work and play through the elevation of play 
to the worth and the usefulness of labour. While we 
work and play separately, the artist is bound to re- 
main a person of inferior dignity; but he saves his 
self-respect by working tacitly for a public, hitherto 
almost undreamed-of save by a few, which shall live 
the whole, the integral, life — that is, which shall wholly 
and exhaustively live all the time, and in which every- 
thing that is suffered to exist at all shall be both de- 
sirable and indispensable, both play and work. In 



282 THE MODERN NOVEL 

that life of the future, blessedly free from the shallow 
distinctions between the things we do because we have 
to and those we do because we want to, the arts can 
really come into their inheritance. Perhaps this is 
only to say that there will never be any adequate ap- 
preciation of the fine art of telling tales until a great 
part of mankind has learned to make a fine art of 
living. 



There is one corollary of taking fiction on such 
terms, as an incessant ministration to living reality, 
which for my part I find it not difficult to accept — 
the deadness at this moment of the once living works 
which we reprint and study and call " classics.' ' To 
begin with, most of them were produced under a 
pretty shallow definition of pleasure; and they have 
therefore nothing to say to our higher ideal unless 
they far exceeded the utmost implications of their 
lower one. Only one thing could save fiction inspired 
by the older ideal: enough scope of vision in the 
artist to see the picture of our common human nature 
as it is for ever, whatever becomes of its momentary 
conditions. Shakspere, Fielding, Jane Austen — 
these, and very few others in English, live by their 
creation of something true that cannot change. 

But the lesser folk who had not this vision — do they 
transmit to us any real message ? The only other pos- 
sible achievement is the timely record of movements, 
tendencies, beliefs, phases of civilization — facts, the 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 283 

material of the lesser and lower realism. And the 
appeal of these is necessarily impermanent just in 
proportion as it is timely and intense. The least in- 
spired realist, if he have conscience, patience, and 
clear eye-sight, can show us in one book more about 
our own decade than all the Maria Edgeworths and 
Harriet Martineaus and Charles Kingsleys in litera- 
ture can teach us about it in all their books put to- 
gether; and unless he have something of eternity in 
his pages, in another decade his work will be as dead 
as most of theirs. 

And why should we not be glad to let him have his 
hour of life in his work? Recognizing or not rec- 
ognizing its mortality, we can afford to be glad of 
whatever vitality it has in its own time, and consent 
to let posterity read for itself as we read for our- 
selves. By the same logic, why should we let an- 
tiquity read for us ? A book is dead when it fails to 
speak fruitfully to us, either of things which are ever- 
lasting, or of things which are pressing and impera- 
tive parts of our lives now. I do not see why we 
should reject books which do the second thing merely 
on the ground that they will be meaningless to the 
future : that fact proves only the livingness of life. 
Neither do I see why we should go out of our ways 
to know and to preserve books merely because they 
meant something once. Either attitude implies a 
veneration for art as something apart from life — a 
disjunction the passing of which this book partly 
records and partly predicts. 

Most novels treat, in one way or another, a single 



284 THE MODERN NOVEL 

constantly recurring situation: that of individual 
wealth or power in its relations with the rest of man- 
kind. Underlying this theme, and every theme, is 
human nature. If in treating the theme the novelist 
can reveal true human nature as it has never been re- 
vealed before in a similar connection, he has done the 
greatest and the only permanent thing. If, failing to 
do that, he reveals an important phase of our present 
commercial civilization, he has done the next greatest. 
His novel is pretty certain of oblivion; but why 
should we pretend that it does not say more to us 
than some nineteenth-century novel that makes us 
laugh or cry, or sleep, over the fortunes of heroes and 
heroines whose concerns are none of ours, except 
through the vainest and most belittling kind of 
curiosity — the instinct of gossip, pure and simple? 

Nothing could have a more sanifying effect on art 
than a ruthless sacrifice of whatever is superstitious 
in our veneration for the writings of the past. 
Meredith points, for the artist, the way to a noble 
disregard of all but living realities when he disclaims 
every thought, every desire, of immortality except on 
the score of service rendered : ' ' ... all right use of 
life, and the one secret of life, is to pave ways for 
the firmer footing of those who succeed us ; as to my 
works, I know them faulty, think them of worth only 
when they point and aid to that end." Art is a liv- 
ing thing to him who makes it : unless it be so to the 
rest of us, have we really accepted it at all? And 
while the artist of the present is content to die as 
soon as his handiwork means nothing to us, is it not 



"ENTERTAINMENT" 285 

strange that we should occupy ourselves with con- 
ferring a fictitious life upon dead artists of the past, 
and, as Professor Sir Walter Raleigh once said, pin 
bits of coloured ribbon on each other for having the 
intelligence to understand their works ? 

I end, because I can do no better, with this eloquent 
account x of the relation between writer and reader, by 
a novelist whose work was beginning just as Mere- 
dith's was ending; an account contained in an early 
Preface which, however often quoted of late, is not 
likely ever to become more familiar than it deserves : 

"Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a 
roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in 
a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder 
languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We 
watch the movements of his body, the waving of his 
arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin 
again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to 
be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he 
is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a 
stump, we look with a more real interest at his 
efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his 
agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and 
even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring 
ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his 
object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and per- 
haps he had not the strength — and perhaps he had 
not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way — and 
forget. 

i The Nigger of the "Narcissus." By Joseph Conrad. New 
York; Doubleday, Page & Co. 1914. Preface, pp. xii-xiii, 



286 THE MODERN NOVEL 



"And so it is with the workman of art. Art is 
long and life is short, and success is very far off. 
And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we 
talk a little about the aim — the aim of art, which, like 
life itself, is inspiring, difficult — obscured by mists. 
It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion ; 
it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless 
secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is 
not less great, but only more difficult. 

"To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands 
busy about the work of the earth, and compel men 
entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for 
a moment at the surrounding vision of form and 
colour, of sunshine and shadows ; to make them pause 
for a look, for a sigh, for a smile — such is the aim, 
difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very 
few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and 
the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And 
when it is accomplished — behold! — all the truth of 
life is there : a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile — and 
the return to an eternal rest." 



A BRIEF SELECTIVE AND SUGGESTIVE BIBLIOG- 
RAPHY OF THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH WITH 
HINTS FOR STUDY 



A BRIEF SELECTIVE AND SUGGESTIVE 

BIBLIOGRAPHY WITH HINTS FOR 

STUDY 

It would be almost possible, with the aid of a great li- 
brary, to fill the space of this reading- and reference-list 
with a bibliography of bibliographies. The purpose of 
the following pages is to represent, not cover, the subject; 
but material is supplied in excess of that reached by the 
ordinary student, and enough, I believe, if one were to fol- 
low it faithfully, to lead one to everything that bears im- 
portantly on the history of the novel in English. 

To save space, I have kept pretty consistently within 
certain limitations. (1) I bear in mind primarily the 
student and the general reader, avoiding the mention of 
works or editions simply for their interest to bibliophile 
and collector. (2) I almost entirely ignore first editions, 
except of books published within twenty-five years; but 
dates of original publication of novels are supplied in 
brackets after the titles. (3) I name, usually, one good 
working library edition of an author's collected writings; 
a recent American edition, readily accessible and suitable to 
be either owned or merely used, whenever I am acquainted 
with one. (4) I name one comprehensive critical estimate 
of each more important author, making a few exceptions 
where there are different estimates which strikingly supple- 
ment each other, or which have independently great intrinsic 
interest. (5) I pay no attention to the short-story save 
where its history obviously crosses and affects that of the 
novel. 

289 



290 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

It has seemed advisable to omit the prices of books listed, 
because, in the conditions produced by the war, book prices 
hardly remain constant for even the period required to see 
a book through the press. 

For convenience and coherence, I have arranged the list 
in groups based partly on chronology and partly on a 
sequence other than the chronological; that is, I have tried 
to suggest the development of certain types and modes of 
fiction, while preserving roughly the order of modern fic- 
tional history in general. The last division, XI., is of neces- 
sity a somewhat personal and therefore arbitrary selection ; 
but it in no way interferes with the use of Divisions I.-X., as 
a disinterested and catholic representation of the subject. 

Titles marked with a star (*) are listed in the useful and 
inexpensive Everyman's Library (London: J. M. Dent & 
Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. General Edi- 
tor, Ernest Rhys). The introductions to volumes of this 
series are invariably helpful in suggestions for reading, as 
well as in suggestions for critical appreciation. 

I. General works of reference, to be consulted on several 
periods or phases of the history of fiction. 

The Cambridge History of English Literature. 
Edited by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller. New 
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1907-17. 14 
vols. 

The History of Fiction. By John Colin Dunlop. 
Wilson's Edition. Bohn Library. 1896. 2 
vols. 

A History of the Novel Previous to the Seven- 
teenth Century. By F. M. Warren. New 
York: Henry Holt and Company. 1895. 

English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 291 

Century. By Leslie Stephen. New York: G. P. 
Putnam's Sons. 1904. 

The English Novel; a study in the development 
of personality. By Sidney Lanier. New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1900. 

A Study of Prose Fiction. By Bliss Perry. 
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1903. 

The Development of the English Novel. By Wil- 
bur L. Cross. New York: The Macmillan Co. 
1899. 

Masters of the English Novel. By Richard Bur- 
ton. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 
1909. 

British Novelists and Their Styles. By David 
Masson. Boston: Willard Small. 1889. 

The English Novel By Walter Raleigh. New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1911. (Fifth 
edition.) 

The English Novel. By George Saintsbury. 
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1913. 

Two Centuries of the English Novel. By Harold 
Williams. London: Smith, Elder. 1911. 

II. On the aesthetics and technique of fiction, see 

The Art of Fiction. By Sir Walter Besant. Bos- 
ton: Cupples, Upham & Co. This volume in- 
cludes Henry James's rejoinder, of the same title 
(also in Partial Portraits). See, in the same 
connection, Stevenson's answer to Henry James 
(A Humble 'Remonstrance, in Memories and 
Portraits). 
Materials and Methods of Fiction. By Clayton 
Hamilton. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 
1908. 



292 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Criticism and Fiction. By William Dean Howells. 
New York : Harper Bros. & Co. 1893. (A de- 
fense of realism. For the opposite view, con- 
taining a criticism of Howells and his school, 
see Ambrose Bierce's essay on The Short Story, 
in The Opimonator, Vol. 10 of the Collected 
Works. New York: Neale Publishing Co. 
1909-12.) 

Notes on Novelists. By Henry James. New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1914. 

The Novels and Tales of Henry James. New 
York Edition. New York: Charles Scribner's 
Sons. 1907-9. (The author's Prefaces.) 

Creative Criticism. By J. E. Spingarn. New 
York: Henry Holt and Company. (Essays on 
the Unity of Genius and Taste.) 

Standards. By W. C. Brownell. New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1916. 

III. For general bibliographical suggestions, see The Cam- 
bridge History of English Literature, Cross's Develop- 
ment of the English Novel, Perry's Study of Prose 
Fiction, Wilson's Edition of Dunlop, and A Descrip- 
tive Guide to the Best Fiction in English, by Ernest A. 
Baker (New York: The Maemillan Company. 1913. 
New Edition, enlarged and thoroughly revised. This 
is the most useful critical and descriptive bibliography 
of fiction in English from the mediaeval romances to 
1911). There is an exhaustive bibliography of the 
novel of manners from 1600 to 1740 in The Bise of the 
Novel of Manners, by Charlotte Elizabeth Morgan 
(New York: Columbia University Press. 1911). 
(See also the catalogues of fiction published by the 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 293 

public libraries of Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati, and 
St. Louis; and Books That Count; a dictionary of 
Standard Books (Edited by W. Forbes Gray. Lon- 
don: Adam and Charles Black. 1912. Columns 241" 
92). 

IV. Pre-Elizabethan forms of prose fiction: the Greek 
romances and the romances of Chivalry. 

Greek Romances. Translated by Rowland Smith. 
Bonn's Library. (Translations from Helio- 
dorus, Tatius, and Longus.) See also Warren 
and Dunlop. 

The Flourishing of Romance and the Age of Al- 
legory. By George Saintsbury. New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1897. See also War- 
ren, Dunlop, and The Cambridge History. 

V. The Elizabethan period: the novella and the novel. 

The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction. 
By Samuel Lee Wolff. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: 
Press of the New Era Printing Co. 1912. 

The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare. 
By J. J. Jusserand. London: T. Fisher Un- 
win. 1894. See also The Cambridge History. 

The following will serve to represent the Elizabethan 
practice of fiction: 

The Palace of Pleasure. By William Painter. 

[1566-7]. London: D. Nutt. 1890. 
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. By Sir 

Philip Sidney. [1590]. Vols. 1-2 of Works, 

London, 1725, 3 vols. Also, New York: E. P. 

Dutton & Co., 1907. (Edited by E. A. Baker, 



294 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

with the additions of Sir William Alexander 
and Richard Beling, a life, and an introduction.) 

Euphues [1579] and Euphues and His England 
[1580]. By John Lyly. Vols. 1 and 2 of 
Works, Oxford : The Clarendon Press, 1902. 3 
vols. 

Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacie, found after 
his death in his cell at Silexedra. By Thomas 
Lodge. [1590]. London: Chatto & Windus. 
1900. (Edited by W. W. Greg.) 

The Unfortunate Traveller; or, the Life of Jack 
Wilton. By Thomas Nash. [1594]. London: 
Chiswick Press. 1892. Edited, with an essay 
on the Life and Writings of Thomas Nash, by 
Edmund Gosse. 

VI. The Seventeenth Century; rise of the novel of man- 
ners; precursors of realism. 
Illustrations of the "heroic" romances: 

Parthenissa; that most fam'd romance. By Roger 
Boyle, First Earl of Orrery. First part, in 6 
vols., 1654; complete edition in 3 vols., 1655. 
Aretina; or, the Serious Romance. By Sir George 

Mackenzie. London: 1661. 
Pandion and Iphigenia; or, the Story of the Coy 
Lady of Thessalia. By John Crowne. London : 
1665. 

All of these are imitations of the imported 
(French) romances of La Calprenede and 
the Scuderys. For an excellent brief ac- 
count of the whole school, see Raleigh's Chap- 
ter IV. Note that The Female Quixote; or 
the Adventures of Arabella (by Mrs. Char- 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 295 

lotte Lennox. Originally published 1752. 
London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1820), a be- 
lated satire on this school, shows how long its 
influence refused to yield to the realistic re- 
action. The romances themselves are out of 
print and not commonly accessible. 
Allegorical realism: 

*Pilgrim , s Progress. By John Bunyan [1678]. 

Oxford. 1879. Clarendon Press Series. 
The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. By John 
Bunyan. [1680]. London: W. Heinemann. 
1900. 

Essay on Bunyan in the Sixth Series of 
Shelbume Essays. By Paul Elmer More. 
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1904-10. 
6 vols. For the historical background of this 
tradition, see Saintsbury's Flourishing of 
Romance and the Age of Allegory. 
Social realism; novels of scandal, etc.: 

Plays, Histories, and Novels. By Mrs. Aphra 
Behn. [1698]. London. 1871. 6 vols. Vol. 
5 contains the best of the novels, including 
Oroonoko; or } The Royal Slave and The Fair 
Jilt. 
Incognita. By William Congreve. London. 
[1692]. Note especially Congreve's anti-ro- 
manticistic Preface. Out of print since 1713. 
For an account, see Raleigh's Chapter IV. 
Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons 
of Quality of Both Sexes. From the New Ata- 
lantis, an Island in the Mediterranean. By 
Mrs. Mary de la Riviere Manley. London. 
1709. 2 vols. Out of print. 



296 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia. 
By Mrs. Eliza Haywood. London. [1725]. 
Note that Mrs. Haywood partly relapsed into 
the romantic-lackadaisical tradition in Idalia; 
or, The Unfortunate Mistress (London. 1725) 
and Philidore and Placentia; or, L' 'Amour trop 
Delicat (London. 1727). All of these are out 
of print. 
Note the development of the "character" in the hands of 
Addison and Steele (Roger de Coverley series of the 
* Spectator Papers). For a summary of the seven- 
teenth-century writers of ''characters," including Over- 
bury and Samuel Butler, see Raleigh, pp. 113-14. 
Pseudo-realistic satire, voyage imaginmre, Utopian ro- 
mance, etc. 

*Travels into several remote Nations of the World, 
by Lemuel Gulliver. By Jonathan Swift. [1726]. 
(Gullivers Travels and Other Works, exactly re- 
printed from the first edition, and edited, with 
some account of Cyrano de Bergerac and his 
voyages to the sun and moon, by H. Morley. 
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1906.) A mod- 
ern edition of Swift is The Prose Works of 
Jonathan Swift. London: G. Bell & Sons. 
1907-S. Of this edition, Gulliver is Vol. 8. 

For estimates of Swift, see Swift, by Leslie 
Stephen (New York. 18S2. English Men of 
Letters) and Essays about Men, Women, and 
Books, by Augustine Birrell (New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons). 
The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Trans- 
actions from the World in the Moon, By 
Daniel Defoe. [1705]. This and Gulliver 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 297 

show the eighteenth-century status of a form the 
lineage of which includes Luoian, The Ultimate 
Things Beyond Thule of Antonius Diogenes 
(see Warren), More's Utopia [1516], and the 
romances of Cyrano de Bergerac and of Vol- 
taire. The form is perpetuated, with modi- 
fications, in Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race 
[1871], Samuel Butlers Erewhon and Ere- 
whon Revisited Twenty Years Later (Post- 
humous. New York : E. P. Dutton & Co. 1910. 
Prefaces 1901), Edward Bellamy's Looking 
Backward, 2000-1887 (Boston: Houghton Mif- 
flin Co., 1888), and several of the earlier me- 
chanistic romances of H. G. Wells, as The War 
of the Worlds ([1898]. New York: Harper 
Bros.), When the Sleeper Wakes ([1899]. New 
York: Harper Bros.), and In the Days of the 
Comet ([1906]. New York: The Century 
Co.). 

Such Oriental romances as *Rasselas, Prince 
of Abyssinia [1759] and The History of the 
Caliph Yatliek: an Arabian Tale from an un- 
published MS. [French version, 1782] are also, 
in part, voyages imaginaires without the pri- 
marily satiric purpose. A more fanciful work 
in the same tradition is Paltock's * Peter Wil- 
kins. (Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. By 
Samuel Johnson. Edited by G. Birkbeck Hill. 
Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1887. Vathek, 
an Arabian Tale. By William Beckford. 
London : Routledge, 1912. The Life and Adven- 
tures of Peter Wilkins. By Robert Paltock? 
[1751]. London: Reeves & Turner. 1884. 



298 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

This is a facsimile reprint of the first edition 
in 2 vols., edited by A. H. Bullen.) 

The picaresque novel ; Defoe. 

* Captain Singleton [1720], Colonel Jacques 
[1722], *Memoirs of a Cavalier [1720], Duncan 
Campbell, etc. In The Works of Daniel De- 
foe, edited by G. H. Maynadier. Boston: Old 
Corner Bookstore. 16 vols. 

For the ancestry of this type, see Warren's 
account of the Spanish picaresque romance (of 
which Cervantes' Don Quixote is a parody) ; also 
the account of Nash's Jack Wilton in Gosse's In- 
troduction. The one definite Spanish proto- 
type of the rogue-novel is now accessible in 
English : Lazarillo de Tormes. Tr. by Louis 
How. New York: Mitchell Kennerley. 1917. 

Later developments of the picaresque novel 
are exemplified by Fielding's History of Mr. 
Jonathan Wild the Great [1743], Smollett's 
Roderick Random [1748] and Peregrine Pickle 
[1751], and Thackeray's Luck of Barry Lyn- 
don [1844]. Dickens's * Oliver Twist [1838] 
owes something to the same tradition; as also, 
in another way, does Stevenson's * Treasure 
Island [1883]. 

The student should consult Romances of 
Roguery, by Frank Chandler Wadleigh. New 
York: The Macmillan Co. 1899. 

The biographical novel; Defoe. 

*The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 
By Daniel Defoe [1719]. (For edition, see 
above.) Also, certain of the picaresque novels 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 299 

of Defoe are biographic in form; notably, 
Memoirs of a Cavalier and Duncan Campbell. 
This development leads straight to the most 
characteristic novels of the great school of 
eighteenth-century realism (e. g., *Tom Jones) 
and of the Victorian period (e. g., * David 
Copper field and *Pendennis). To a certain 
slight extent, Aphra Behn is Defoe's predeces- 
sor in the biographical novel. 

On Defoe, see Daniel Defoe, by William 
Minto. (New York: 1879. English Men of 
Letters) ; also, the essay on Defoe in Vol. 1 of 
Hours in a Library, by Leslie Stephen. (New 
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1894. 4 vols.) 

For a general account of the novel of man- 
ners in this period, and an exhaustive bibliog- 
raphy, consult Miss Morgan's The Rise of the 
Novel of Manners. The Cambridge History is 
notably helpful on the seventeenth century. 

VII. The realists from Richardson to Jane Austen. 
Samuel' Richardson. 

* Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded [1740]. Clar- 
issa Harlowe; or, The History of a Young Lady 
[1748]. The History of Sir Charles Grandison 
[1753]. By Samuel Richardson. In Richard- 
son's Works. London: Chapman & Hall. 20 
vols. 1902. 

Samuel Richardson. By Austin Dobson. 
New York. 1902. (English Men of Letters.) 
Also, essays on Richardson in Letters on Litera- 
ture, by Andrew Lang (London: Longmans, 



300 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1889); Res Judicatae, by Augustine Birrell 
(New York: Charles Seribner's Sons. 1897); 
and Vol. 1 of Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Li- 
brary. 
Henry Fielding. 

*The History of the Adventures of Joseph 
Andrews [1742]. *The History of Tom Jones, 
A Foundling [1749]. Amelia [1751]. (For 
Jonathan Wild, see VI., under the picaresque 
novel, above.) In The Works of Henry Field- 
ing. Edited, with a biographical essay by Leslie 
Stephen. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1882. 
10 vols. American edition: Edited by G. H. 
Maynadier. New York: Athenaeum Society. 
1903. 12 vols. 

Fielding. By Austin Dobson. New York. 
1883. (English Men of Letters). Essays in 
Andrew Lang-'s Letters on Literature and Vol. 2 
of Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library. 
Tobias George Smollett. 

Roderick Random [1748]. Peregrine Pickle 
[1751]. Ferdinand, Count Fathom [1753]. 
Sir Lancelot Greaves [1762]. Humphrey Clin- 
ker [1771]. In The Works of Tobias George 
Smollett, edited with introduction by G. H. May- 
nadier. Boston: Old Corner Bookstore. 1902. 
12 vols. For Roderick Random and Peregrine 
Pickle, see the picaresque novel, under VI, 
above. Ferdinand, Count Fathom is an inferior 
example of much the same type. Sir Lancelot 
Greaves is in the mode of Cervantes; it should 
be noted that Smollett did, with evident gusto, a 
translation of Don Quixote. Note in Humphrey 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 301 

Clinker the occurrence of the letter-form as 
practised by Richardson. This alone of Smol- 
lett's novels is realistic in both form and sub- 
stance. 

Life of Tobias George Smollett. By David 
Hannay. London: Walter Scott. 1887. 
(Great Writers Series.) 

Laurence Sterne. 

*The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy 
[1759-67]. A Sentimental Journey [1768]. In 
The Complete Works of Laurence Sterne. 
With an introduction by W. L. Cross. New 
York: The Colonial Society. 1904. 6 vols. 
This edition includes the Life by Percy Fitz- 
gerald, which see. 

Sterne. By H. D. Traill. New York. 1882. 
(English Men of Letters.) The Life and Times 
of Laurence Sterne. By Wilbur L. Cross. 
New York: The Macmillan Company. 1909. 
Essays in Augustine Birrell's Men, Women, and 
Books; Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library, 
Vol. 3; and Shelburne Essays, Third Series, by 
Paul Elmer More. (New York: G. P. Put- 
nam's Sons. 1904r-10.) 

Oliver Goldsmith. 

*The Vicar of Wakefield [1766]. Vol. 2 of 
The Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Edited by 
Peter Cunningham, and including Forster's Life. 
Boston: The Jefferson Press. 1900. 12 vols. 

Frances Burney (Mme. D'Arblay). 

*Evelina [1778] and Cecilia [1782]. In 
Bohn's Novelist Library. London. 1883 and 



302 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1882. Each, 2 vols. Cecilia. New York: The 
Macmillan Co. 1904. 

Fanny Burney. By Austin Dobson, New 
York: The Macmillan Co. 1903. (English 
Men of Letters). Essay in More's Shelburne 
Essays, Fourth Series. 
Maria Edgeworth. 

*Castle Rackrent [1800] and *The Absentee 
[1801]. Both in No. 410 of Everyman's Li- 
brary. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.) 
Belinda [1801]. Leonora [1806]. Helen [1834]. 
In the Longford Edition of her Works. Lon- 
don. 1893. 10 vols. 

Maria Edgeworth. By Emily Lawless. Lon- 
don: The Macmillan Co. 1903. (English Men 
of Letters). For Miss Edgeworth's influence 
on Scott, see Brander Matthews' introduction 
to Castle Rackrent and The Absentee in Every- 
man's Library. 
Jane Austen. 

*Pride and Prejudice [1813]. * Sense and 
Sensibility [1811]. * Northanger Abbey [1818]. 
*Mans field Park [1814]. "Persuasion [1818]. 
*Emma [1816]. In The Works of Jane Austen. 
London : Chatto & Windus. 1908. 10 vols. 

Life of Jane Austen. By Goldwin Smith. 
London: 1890. (Great Writers Series.) 
On the period as a whole, see, besides Cross, Raleigh, 
Saintsbury's English Novel, and The Cambridge His- 
tory, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, by 
Edmund Gosse (London. 1889) ; and English Litera- 
ture and Society in the Eighteenth Century, by Leslie 
Stephen (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1904). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 303 

Thackeray's Lectures on *The English Humorists 
(Vol. 5 of Works; see X., below) treats the humorous 
realists from Congreve to Sterne. 
VIII. Gothic and Oriental romances; the School of Terror, 
etc. 

*The Life and Ad/ventures of Peter Wilkins. By 
Robert Paltock [1751]. London: Reeves & Tur- 
ner. 1884. 

The Castle of Otranto. By Horace Walpole 
[1764]. London. 1892. In Cassell's National 
Library. Essay on Walpole in Vol. 1 of Leslie 
Stephen's Hours in a Library. 

The Old English Baron. By Clara Reeve [1777]. 
The Castle of Otranto and The Old English 
Baron have been reprinted together by Warne, 
1872, and by Nimmo, 1883, and separately in 
Cassell's National Library. 

The Mysteries of Udolpho. By Anne Radcliffe 
[1794]. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1903. 
The Romance of the Forest. By the same. 
[1791]. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1904. 
A Sicilian Romance [1709] and The Italian; or, 
the Confessional of the Black Penitent [1797], 
the latter perhaps the best of Mrs. RadclinVs 
romances, are out of print. 

The Monk; a Romance. By Matthew Gregory 
("Monk") Lewis. Also entitled Ambrosio; or, 
The Monk. [1795]. New York: E. P. Dut- 
ton & Co. 1907. 

Caleb Williams; or, Things as They Are. By 
William Godwin. [1795]. London: Routledge, 
1904. St. Leon [1799] and Fleetwood [1805] 
are out of print. See essay on Godwin's Novels 



304 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

in Leslie Stephen's Studies of a Biographer 
(London: Duckworth & Co. 4 vols. 1899- 
1902). 

Melmoth the Wanderer [1820]. By Charles Rob- 
ert Maturin. London: Richard Bentley & Son. 
1892. 3 vols. This edition contains a memoir 
and a valuable bibliography of Maturin's 
works. 

^Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 
[1818]. By Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) 
Shelley. New York : E. P. Dutton & Co. No. 
616 of Everyman's Library. Tales and Stories. 
By Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley. 
London. 1891. Introduction by Richard Gar- 
nett. (Treasure house of tales by great au- 
thors.) 

Crotchet Castle [1831]. By Thomas Love Pea- 
cock. London: J. M. Dent & Co. 1891. Edited 
by Richard Garnett. In the same edition, Gryll 
Grange [1860], 1891, 2 vols.; * Headlong Hall 
[1816], 1892; Maid Marian [1822], 1892; 
Melincourt [1817], 1891; ^Nightmare Abbey 
[1817], 1892; and The Misfortunes of Elphin 
[1829], 1891. 

Essay on Peacock in Essays in English Liter- 
ature, by George Saintsbury. (London: Per- 
cival & Co. 1891.) 

Klosterheim [1832]. The Avenger [1838]. The 
Spanish Military Nun. By Thomas De Quincey. 
In Vols. 12-13 of The Collected Writings of 
Thomas De Quincey. Edited by David Masson. 
London: A. & C. Black. 1896-97. 

For Johnson's Rasselas and Beckford's Vathek, 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 305 

see the Utopian romance, etc., under VI. above; 
also The Oriental Tale in England in the Eight- 
eenth Century, by Martha Pike Conant. 

Note the influence of the School of Terror on the 
historical romances of Harrison Ainsworth 
(see IX. below) ; also on the Christmas stories 
of Dickens (for whom, see X. below) and on 
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (see X. be- 
low). 

* Tales of Mystery, etc. [1839-]. By Edgar Al- 
lan Poe. Vols. 1-5 of The Works of Edgar 
Allan Poe, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman 
and George Edward Woodberry. New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1894-5. 10 vols. 
For memoir and introduction, see Vol. 1. 

*The House of the Seven Gables [1851]. *The 
Scarlet Letter [1850]. *The Marble Faun 
[I860]. Septimius Felton [1872]. Dr. Grim- 
shawe's Secret [1883]. By Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne. Vols. 3, 5-6, 11, 13 of the Standard 
Library Edition of The Works of Nathaniel 
Hawthorne. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 
1882-96. Hawthorne. By Henry James. 
New York. 1879. (English Men of Letters). 
Nathaniel Hawthorne. By George E. Wood- 
berry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1902 
(American Men of Letters.) 

For the literary ancestry of Poe and Hawthorne, 
see the First Series of Shelburne Essays, by 
Paul Elmer More, essay on The Origins of 
Hawthorne and Poe. Two excellent modern 
estimates, in comparison and contrast of the 
two writers, are the essays in American Prose 



306 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Masters, by W. C. Brownell. (New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1909.) 

Note the conversion of the novel of terror into the 
modem pseudo-realistic novel of mystery and 
suspense in the stories of Wilkie Collins (in 
New Edition. London: Chatto & Windus. 
After Dark [1856], 1891; The Haunted Hotel, 
1892; *The Woman in White [1860], 1896; Ar- 
madale [1866], 1897; The Moonstone [1868], 
1897; No Name [1862], 1898; etc.); also in 
those of A. Conan Doyle (e. g., The Hound of 
the Baskervilles [1902]. New York: McClure, 
1902. A Study in Scarlet [1887], and The Sign 
of the Four [1889]. New York: Harper Bros. 
& Co., 1904). See also, among mid-nineteenth 
century experiments in the psychic, Bulwer's 
Zanoni [1842] and A Strange Story [1862] 
(for edition, see X. below). The complete as- 
similation of the element of terror, mystery, and 
supematuralism into the modern realistic mode 
occurs in Henry James's Turn of the Screw and 
some of Rudyard Kipling's stories, as The End 
of the Passage and The Mark of the Beast. 

For a general treatment and valuable biblio- 
graphical suggestions, consult The Supernatural 
in English Fiction, by Dorothy Scarborough 
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1917). 

IX. Historical novels and romances. 

Queenhoo-Hall; a romance. By Joseph Strutt. 

Edinburgh. [1808]. Finished and edited by 

Sir Walter Scott. Out of print. 
*The Waverley Novels. New York: Harper & 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 307 

Bros. 30 vols. *Waverley [1814] (Vol. 1- 
2) ; *Rob Roy [1817] (Vol. 5) ; *A Legend of 
Montrose [1819] (Vol. 6) ; *The Bride of Lam- 
mermoor [1819] (Vol. 10); *Ivanhoe [1819] 
(Vol. 11) ; *Kenilworth [1821] (Vol. 14) ; etc. 

Sir Walter Scott. By R. H. Hutton. New 
York. 1879. (English Men of Letters). For 
detailed study, see A Key to the Waverley 
Novels in chronological sequence, with index of 
characters, by Henry Grey. (New edition. 
London, 1899). Essay, Scotch Novels and 
Scotch History, in the Third Series of Paul El- 
mer More's Shelbume Essays. 

Bulwer's Works. *Harold, the Last of the Saxon 
Kings [1848]. *The Last Days of Pompeii 
[1834]. *The Last of the Barons [1843]. 
*Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes [1835]. 
Leila [1838]. Devereux [1829]. By Edward 
Bulwer-Lytton. (See also under VIII. and X.). 

Historical Romances of Harrison Ainsworth. Vic- 
torian Edition. Philadelphia: George Barrie & 
Son. 20 vols. Especially, Jack Sheppard 
[1839] (Vol. 2) ; Windsor Castle [1843] (Vol. 
10) ; and *The Tower of London [1840] (Vols. 
14-15). See VIII. above. 

*Henry Esmond [1852]. *The Virginians [1858- 
9]. Denis Duval (unfinished) [1867]. Vols. 3, 
10, and 13 of Biographical Edition (see X.). 

*The Cloister and the Hearth. By Charles Reade. 
[1861]. Vols. 1-2 of Works. (See X.). 

*Romola. By George Eliot [1863]. In Works 
(see X.). See Chapter IX of Leslie Stephen's 



308 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

George Eliot. (New York: The Macmillan Co. 
1902. English Men of Letters.) 

•Westward Ho! [1855]. *Hypatia [1853]. 
*Hereward the Wake [1866]. By Charles 
Kingsley. Vols. 1-2, 9-10, and 11-12 of The 
Life and Works of Charles Kingsley. (New 
York: The Macmillan Co. 1901-03. 19 vols.) 
See X. below. 

Essays in Vol. 3 of Leslie Stephen's Hours 
in a Library, and Studies in Early Victorian 
Literature, by Frederic Harrison. (London: 
Edward Arnold. 1906.) 

•Kidnapped [1886] and David Balfour [sequel, 
1892]. The Black Arrow [1888]. St. Ives 
[1892]. The Weir of Hermiston [1896]. Vols. 
3, 8, 4, 11, and 10, respectively, of The Works of 
Robert Louis Stevenson, Biographical Edition. 
(New York: Charles Seribner's Sons. 1906. 25 
vols.) 

Essay on Stevenson in Vol. 4 of Leslie Ste- 
phen's Studies of a Biographer. See also 
Stevenson's Gossip on Romance, in Memories 
and Portraits. 

Stevenson's attempt to re-create the historical 
romance of Scott marks the end of a tradition. 
In the hands of his successors, who may be 
represented by Anthony Hope Hawkins {The 
Prisoner of Zenda), Sir Gilbert Parker (Seats 
of the Mighty), Justin Huntly McCarthy, Stan- 
ley Weyman, Francis Marion Crawford, Mau- 
rice Hewlett, Mary Johnston, and Winston 
Churchill, the historical romance tends to be- 
come sentimental melodrama. More nearly in 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 309 

the vein of Scott is The White Company, by A. 
Conan Doyle [1891]. (London: Smith, Elder. 
1891.) 

The most successful part of Stevenson's in- 
fluence appears to have been exerted through 
* Treasure Island (Vol. 1) rather than through 
the primarily historical romances. The most 
Stevensonian of writers after Stevenson is Sir 
Arthur T. Quiller- Couch (note his skilfully 
written concluding chapters of Stevenson's un- 
finished St. Ives). See Early Novels and Stor- 
ies by " Q." New York: Charles Scribner's 
Sons. Uniform Edition, 9 vols. \ 

Marius the Epicurean. By Walter Horatio Pater. 
London : Macmillan & Co. 1892. 2 vols. 

The Valley of Decision. By Edith Wharton. 
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1902. 
2 vols. (Fifth and subsequent impressions in 
one vol.) 

Verandlda. By George Gissing. London: Con- 
stable & Co., 1903. (Posthumous; unfinished.) 
For a very thorough and painstaking bibliog- 
raphy of the whole cycle of historical fiction to 
the present time, see A Guide to Historical 
Fiction, by Ernest A. Baker. (New York: The 
Macmillan Co. 1914.) 

X. Victorian realism and pseudo-realism. 
A. The novelists of manners, etc. 
Charles Dickens. 

Works, Biographical Edition, with introduc- 
tions by Arthur Waugh. (London: Chapman 



310 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

, & Hall. 20 vols.) Works, illustrated edition. 

(New York: The Maemillan Co. 20 vols.) 

*The Pickwick Papers [1837]. *Nicholas 
Nickleby [1839]. *Martin Chuzzlewit [1844]. 
*Dombey and Son [1848]. *David Copperfield 
[1850]. * Bleak House [1853]. *Hard Times 
[1854]. "Little Dorrit [1857]. * Great Ex- 
pectations [1859]. * Our Mutual Friend [1805]. 
*The Mystery of Edwin Drood [posthumous, 
1870]. 

Note that *A Tale of Two Cities [1859] and 
*Barnaby Budge [1840-1] are classifiable un- 
der the historical novel (IX.). 

Charles Dickens; a critical study. By G. K. 
Chesterton. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 
190G. Charles Dickens; a critical study. By 
George Gissing. London: Blackie. Essays in 
Corrected Impressions, by George Saintsbury 
(London: W. Heinemann. 1895), Frederic 
Harrison's Studies in Early Victorian Litera- 
ture, and the Fifth Series of More's Shelbume 
Essays. 
The Brontes. 

*Jane Eyre [1847]. *The Professor [1857]. 
* Shirley [1849]. *Villette [1853]. By Char- 
lotte Bronte. *The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 
[1848] By Anne Bronte. *Wuthering Heights 
[1847]. By Emily Bronte (see also VIII, 
above). In The Life and Works of the Sis- 
ters Bronte. New York: Harper & Bros. 
1899-1900. 7 vols. This edition includes Mrs. 
GaskelPs *Life of Charlotte Bronte, which see. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 311 

An edition of Wuthering Heights published 
by Doubleday, Page & Co. (New York. 1907) 
contains a bibliography of the Brontes. 

Essays in George Saintsbury's Corrected Im- 
pressions, Frederic Harrison's Studies in Early 
Victorian Literature, and Vol. 3 of Leslie Ste- 
phen's Hours in a Library. 
William Makepeace Thackeray. 

Works, Biographical Edition. New York: 
Harper & Bros. 1898-1903. 13 vols. See IX. 
above; and, for Barry Lyndon, VI. * Vanity 
Fair [1847-8]. *Pendennis [1849-50]. *The 
Newcomes [1854r-5]. 

Vol. 13 contains the Life by Leslie Stephen, 
and a bibliography. See also the Life by An- 
thony Trollope. (New York: 1879. English 
Men of Letters.) 

Essays in Saintsbury's Corrected Impres- 
sions, Harrison's Studies in Early Victorian 
Literature, and Victorian Prose Masters, by W. 
C. Brown ell. (New York: Charles Seribner's 
Sons. 1915.) 
Edward Bulwer-Lytton. 

The Caxtons [1849]. "My Novel/' by Pisis- 
tratus Caxton; or, Varieties in English Life 
[1853]. What Will He Do With Itf [1858]. 
Kenelm Chillingly [1873]. In Bulwer's Works. 
London: George Routledge & Sons. 

See also VIII. and IX. above. 
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield. 

Vivian Grey [1826]. Contarini Fleming 
[1832]. Lothair [1870]. Endymion [1880]. 



312 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

In The Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli. 
London. 1900. 11 vols. 

See also B. below. 

Essays in Harrison's Studies in Early Victo- 
rian Literature and Vol. 2 of Stephen's Hours 
in a Library. 
Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. 

Works, with introductions by A. W. Ward. 
London: Smith, Elder & Co.; New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1906-11. 8 vols. 
*Cranford [1853]; Ruth [1853]; *Sylvia>s 
Lovers [1863]. 

See also B. below. 

Essay in the Fifth Series of More's Shelburne 
Essays. 
Charles Reade. 

Works. Boston: Dana Estes. 18 vols. 
Hard Cash [1863]. Griffith Gaunt [1866]. A 
Terrible Temptation [1871]. Foul Play [1869]. 

Perhaps more common is the "Copyright 
Edition," Collection of British Authors (Leip- 
zig: Tauchnitz). 

See, for The Cloister and the Hearth, IX. 
above. 
George Eliot (Marian Evans Cross). 

Works, Standard Edition, 21 vols. New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. *Adam Bede 
[1859]. *The Mill on the Floss [I860]; Mid- 
dlemarch [1871-2]. * Silas Marner [1861]. 
Daniel Deronda [1876]. For Romola, see IX. 
above; for Felix Holt the Radical, B. below. 

George Eliot. By Leslie Stephen. New 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 313 

York: The Macmillan Co. 1902. (English 
Men of Letters.) Essays in Saintsbury's Cor- 
rected Impressions; Harrison's Studies in Early 
Victorian Literature; Vol. 3 of Stephen's 
Hours in a Library; and Brownell's Victorian 
Prose Masters. 
Anthony Trollope. 

*The Barchester Novels, in order: *The War- 
den [1855] ; *Barchester Towers [1857] ; *Doc- 
tor Thome [1858] ; *Framley Parsonage [1861] ; 
*The Small House at Allington [1864]; *The 
Last Chronicle of Bar set [1867]. 

Other works, Parliamentary novels, etc.: 
Can You Forgive Her? [1864^5] ; Phineas Finn, 
the Irish Member [1866] ; Phineas Bedux 
[1874]; The Eustace Diamonds [1872]; The 
Way We Live Now [1875]. 

These are now most commonly seen in the 
"Copyright Edition," Collection of British Au- 
thors (Leipzig: Tauchnitz). Also, several of 
the Parliamentary and Manor House novels are 
published by Dodd, Mead and Co., New York, 
1910-. 

See also Trollope's Autobiography (New 
York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1910.) Essays in 
Saintsbury's Corrected Impressions and Harri- 
son's Studies in Early Victorian Literature. 
Margaret Oliphant Oliphant. 

Passages in the Life of Mistress Margaret Mait- 
land [1849]. Lilliesleaf [sequel, 1856]. Both 
published by Ward and Locke, London. * Salem 
Chapel [1863]. The Bector [1863]; The Doc- 



314 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

tor's Family [1863] ; and The Perpetual Curate 
[1864]. Published in 1 vol., Blackwood, Lon- 
don. Miss Marjoribanks [1866]. London: 
Blackwood. Phoebe, Junior: the Last Chronicle 
of Carlingford [1876]. London: Hurst and 
Blackett. 

Published, under the collective title "Chron- 
icles of Carlingford," in the "Copyright Edi- 
tion," Collection of British Authors (Leipzig: 
Tauchnitz). 
George Meredith. 

Works of George Meredith, Memorial Edi- 
tion. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
1909-12. 29 vols. The Ordeal of Richard 
Feverel [1859], 2; Sandra Belloni [1864] 
(originally, Emilia in England), 3^£; Rhoda 
Fleming [1865], 5; Evan Harrington [1861], 6; 
Vittoria [1866] (sequel to Sandra Belloni), 7- 
8; The Adventures of Harry Richmond [1871], 
9-10; Beauchamp's Career [1876], 11-12; The 
Egoist [1879], 13-14; The Tragic Comedians 
[1880], 15; Diana of the Crossways [1885], 16; 
One of Our Conquerors [1891], 17; Lord Or- 
mont and His Aminta [1894], 18; The Amazing 
Marriage [1895], 19; The House on the Beach 
[1895], 22. 

George Meredith; his life and art. By J. A. 
Hammerton. New and revised edition. Edin- 
burgh, 1911. Essays in the Second Series of 
More's Shelburne Essays and Brownell's Vic- 
torian Prose Masters. See also Meredith's Es- 
say on the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of 
the Comic Spirit, Vol. 23. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 315 

William Black. 

The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton [1872J. 
London: Macmillan & Co. 1878. Madcap Vio- 
let [1877]. London: Macmillan & Co. 1880. 
White Wings; a yachting romance [1880]. Lon- 
don: Macmillan & Co. 1882. Shandon Bells 
[1883]. New York: A. L. Burt (The Manhat- 
tan Library). 
Henry James. 

Novels and Tales, New York Edition. New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1907-09. 
24 vols. Roderick Hudson [1875], 1; The 
American [1877], 2; Portrait of a Lady [1881], 
3-4; The Tragic Muse [1891], 7-8; The Awk- 
ward Age [1899], 9; What Maisie Knew [1897], 
11; The Ambassadors [1903], 21-22; The Wings 
of the Dove [1902], 19-20; The Golden Bowl 
[1905], 23-24. 

Uncollected: The Sacred Fount. (New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1901.) The 
Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower (both 
posthumous. New York: Charles Scribner's 
Sons. 1917). 

See also, in the New York Edition, the fol- 
lowing modern novelle, illustrating the expan- 
sion of the short-story into a modification of the 
novel: Daisy Miller [1878], 18; A London 
Life [1888], 10; The Spoils of Poynton [1897], 
10; The Aspern Papers [1888], 12; The Turn 
of the Screw [1898] (see also under VIII. ), 12; 
The Author of Beltraffio [1885], 16; and The 
Altar of the Dead [1895], 17. 



316 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Henry James. By Ford Madox Hueffer. 
London: Martin Seeker. 1913. Henry James. 
By Rebecca West. New York : Henry Holt and 
Company. 1916 (Writers of the Day). Essay 
in Brownell's American Prose Masters. 

See, above all, the author's prefaces to the 
volumes of the New York Edition. 
William Dean Howells. 

Their Wedding Journey [1871]. Boston: 
Houghton Mifflin Co. Their Silver Wedding 
Journey [1899, sequel]. New York: Harper 
Bros. A Foregone Conclusion [1875]. Bos- 
ton: Houghton Mifflin Co. The Lady of the 
"Aroostook" [1878]. Boston: Houghton Mif- 
flin Co. The Undiscovered Country [1880]. 
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Doctor Breen's 
Practice [1881]. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 
A Modern Instance [1883]. Boston: Hough- 
ton Mifflin Co. The Bise of Silas Lapham 
[1885]. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. The 
Minister's Charge; or, the Apprenticeship of 
Lemuel Barker [1887], Boston: Houghton 
Mifflin Co. Annie Kilburn [1888] . New York : 
Harper Bros. The Quality of Mercy [1892]. 
New York: Harper Bros. A Traveller from 
Altruria [1894]. New York: Harper Bros. 
The Story of a Play [1898]. New York: Har- 
per Bros. The Kentons [1902]. New York: 
Harper Bros. The Son of Royal Langbrith 
[1904]. New York: Harper Bros. Fennel and 
Rue [1908]. New York: Harper Bros. The 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 317 

Leatherwood God [1916]. New York: The 
Century Co. 

William Dean Howells. By Alexander Har- 
vey. New York: B. W. Huebsch. 1917. See 
also My Literary Passions (by W. D. Howells. 
New York: Harper & Bros. 1895) and Litera- 
ture and Life (by the same. New York: Har- 
per & Bros. 1902). 

An interesting twentieth-century reversion to the 
form and spirit of the Early Victorian novel 
is the fiction of William De Morgan: Joseph 
Vance; Alice-F 'or- Short ; It Never Can Happen 
Again; Somehow Good; A Likely Story; When 
Ghost Meets Ghost. New York: Henry Holt 
and Company. 1906-14. Note that De Mor- 
gan's choice of a technique was quite deliberate : 
his fifth novel, An Affair of Dishonor (New 
York: Holt. 1911), is a strictly modern piece 
of naturalism. 
B. Novelists of Protests; social satirists. 

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield. 

*Coningsby; or, The New Generation [1844]. 
Sybil; or, The Two Nations [1845]. Tancred; 
or, The New Crusade [1844]. Vols. 7-9 of 
Novels and Tales. See A. above. 

Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. 

*Mary Barton [1848]. *North and South 
[1855]. Vols. 1 and 4 of Works. See A. 
above. 

Charles Kingsley. 

* Alton Locke the Tailor [1850]. * J east 



318 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

[1851]. Vols. 7-8 and 15 of Life and Works. 
See IX. above. 
Sir Walter Besant. 

Children of Gibeon [1886]. All Sorts and 
Conditions of Men [1882] . New York : Harper 
& Bros. 1902. 
George Gissing. 

Demos; a story of English Socialism [1886], 
London: Smith, Elder & Co. Thyrza [1887]. 
London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1907. In the 
Year of Jubilee [1894]. New York: Appleton. 
The New Grub Street [1891]. London: Smith, 
Elder. Will Warburton. London: A. Con- 
stable & Co. 1905. The Whirlpool [1897]. 
New York: Stokes. The Private Papers of 
Henry Ryecroft [1903]. New York: E. P. 
Dutton & Co. 1903 (also No. 46 of Boni & 
Liveright's Modern Library, New York, with 
introduction by Paul Elmer More). The Odd 
Women [1893]. New York: Maemillan. 

George Gissing. By Frank Swinnerton. 
London: Martin Seeker. The Private Life of 
Henry Maitland; a record dictated by J. H. 
Revised and edited by Morley Roberts. New 
York: George H. Doran Co. 1912. (A thinly 
disguised biography of Gissing, with a liberal 
admixture of criticism.) 

Essay in the Fifth Series of More's Shelburne 
Essays. 

See also IX. above. 
Note that Reade's It Is Never Too Late to 21 end 
and Put Yourself in His Place, Dickens's Hard 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 319 

Times, and George Eliot's *Felix Holt the Radi- 
cal (see A. above) turn partly on economic con- 
ditions and struggles of class. Reade's Hard 
Cash and Foul Play, and many of Dickens's 
novels, as Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist, 
contain strong elements of protest against par- 
ticular isolated abuses. 
George Bernard Shaw. 

Love Among the Artists [1889]. The Irra- 
tional Knot [1905]. An Unsocial Socialist 
[1887]. Cashell Byron's Profession [1886]. 
Written 1880-. New York: Brentano's. 1909- 
10. 
Samuel Butler. 

The Way of All Flesh. Written 1872-84. 
Published 1903 (posthumous). New York: E. 
P. Dutton & Co. 1913. Also No. 13 of Boni 
& Liveright's Modern Library, New York. See 
also VI. above. 
A great deal of the most characteristic social real- 
ism of 1903-18 shows markedly the influence of 
Butler — notably, the work of Gilbert Cannan, 
J. D. Beresford, Compton Mackenzie, W. L. 
George, Elinor Mordaunt, W. B. Maxwell, and 
St. John G. Ervine. 
C. Novelists of Local Colour, etc. 

James Fenimore Cooper (the American Indian, 
etc.). 

Collected Writings, Iroquois Edition New 
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1906. The 
Leatherstocking Tales, Vols. 5, 11, 18, 20, 21. 
(*The Deerslayer [1841]; *The Last of the 



320 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Mohicans [1826]; *The Pathfinder [1840]; 
*The Pioneers [1823]; *The Prairie [1826].) 
The Bravo, 2 ; The Pilot, 19 ; The Spy, 27. 

Cooper shows the influence of Scott, who in 
turn shows that of Maria Edgeworth. See VII. 
above. 

Essay on Cooper in Brownell's American 
Prose Masters. See also Howells's My Literary 
Passions. 

Samuel Lover (Ireland and the Irish). 

*Handy Andy [1842-3]. New York: The 
Athenaeum Society. 2 vols. (Copyright, 1901, 
Boston: Little, Brown & Co.) 

Suggestions for reading and study of Irish 
local colour may be found in Irish Life in Irish 
Fiction, by Horatio Sheafe Krans (New York: 
The Macmillan Co. 1903). 

Charles Lever (Irish life; military life). 

Military Novels (Charles O'Malley [1841], 
etc.). New York Athenaeum Society. 7 vols. 
Novels of Adventure (*Harry Lorrequer [1839- 
40], etc.). New York: Athenaeum Society. 5 
vols. 

Frederick Marryatt (Sailors and the sea; the 
Royal Navy). 

*Masterman Ready [1841]. * Jacob Faithful 
[1834]. The Phantom Ship [1839]. *The 
King's Own [1830]. *Mr. Midshipman Easy 
[1836]. *Peter Simple [1834]. In The Nov- 
els of Capt. Marryatt. New York: E. P. Dut- 
ton & Co. 

Note that the beginning of this tradition in 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 321 

the novel is in Smollett's Roderick Random and 
Peregrine Pickle (see VII. above). 
George Borrow (Gipsies; Vagabondia; Wales). 

*Lavengro [1851]. *The Romany Rye 
[1857]. *The Bible in Spain [1843]. *Wild 
Wales. London: John Murray. 1896-. 

George Borrow and His Circle. By Clement 
King Shorter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 
1913. In the Footsteps of Borrow and Fitz- 
gerald. By Morley Adams. London: Jarrold 
& Sons. 1915. 

Essays in Birrell's Res Judicatce and Saint- 
bury's Essays in English Literature. 
Note, in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and in 
the romances of Hawthorne (see VIII. and A. 
above), the union of local colour with the ele- 
ment of mystery or horror. 
George Macdonald (Scotland). 

*8ir Gibbie [1879]. New York: E. P. Dut- 
ton & Co. (No. 678 of Everyman's Library.) 
Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (English pro- 
vincial life). 

Ruth; *Phyllis; *Cranford; etc. See A. 
above. 
Note that George Eliot's early "novels of memory" 
(Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Mar- 
ner) are also strongly provincial in their real- 
ism. Trollope's Barchester Novels and Mrs. 
Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford are al- 
most equally regional. See A. above. Note 
also, among reprints of the early (Irish) novels 
of Trollope, The Macdermots of BalVycloran. 
London : Ward, Locke & Co. 



322 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Richard Doddridge Blackmore (Devonshire). 

*Loma Boone; a romance of Exmoor. 
*Springhaven. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 
(Nos. 304 and 350 of Everyman's Library.) 
Thomas Hardy ("Wessex"). 

Under the Greenwood Tree [1872]. Far 
From the Madding Crowd [1874]. The Mayor 
of Casterbridge [1886]. A Pair of Blue Eyes 
[1872-3]. The Woodlanders [1887]. The Re- 
turn of the Native [1878]. The Well-Beloved 
[1897]. Tess of the D'Urbevilles [1891]. Jude 
the Obscure [1895]. New York: Harper & 
Bros. 

Thomas Hardy. By Harold Child. New 
York: Henry Holt and Co. 1916. (Writers 
of the Day.) A Bibliography of the Works of 
Thomas Hardy, 1865-1915. By A. P. Webb. 
London : F. Hollings. 1916. The Wessex of Ro- 
mance. By Wilkinson Sherren. New and re- 
vised edition. London: Chapman & Hall. 
1908. (Bibliography, pp. 286-95.) George 
Eliot and Thomas Hardy. By Lina Wright 
Berle. New York: Mitchell Kennerley. 1917. 
"Mark Twain" (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) 
(The Middle West). 

Adventures of Tom Sawyer [1876]. Adven- 
tures of Huckleberry Finn [1885]. Pudd'n- 
head Wilson [1894]. The Writings of Mark 
Twain, Author's National Edition. New York: 
Harper & Bros. 1915. 

Mark Twain. By Archibald Henderson. 
London: Duckworth & Co. 1911. My Mark 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 323 

Twain; reminiscences and criticisms. By W. 
D. Howells. New York : Harper & Bros. 1910. 

Note also the specialized treatments of par- 
ticular sections of North America by innumer- 
able novelists of various degrees of distinction, 
including Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Wash- 
ington Cable, Mary Noailles Murfee, Hamlin 
Garland, Alice Brown, Gertrude Atherton, Mary 
Austin, Norman Duncan, Owen Wister, Jack 
London, Rex Beach, Stewart Edward White, 
James Lane Allen, William Allen White, John 
Fox, jr., and Gilbert Parker. A majority of 
the novels of William Dean Howells show him 
to be of this school of localists, as his Criticism 
and Fiction shows him to be its chief sponsor. 
J. M. Barrie (Scottish Life and Character). 

The Little Minister [1891]. Sentimental 
Tommy [1896]. Tommy and Grizel [1900]. 
In Works, Author's Edition. New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1901-03. 11 vols. 
Rudyard Kipling (India). 

Kim [1901]. New York: Doubleday, Page 
& Co. 

Rudyard Kipling. By John Palmer. New 
York: Henry Holt and Company. 1915. 
(Writers of the Day.) 
Joseph Conrad (Malayan Archipelago). 

Almayer's Folly [1895]. An Outcast of the 
Islands [sequel, 1896]. Lord Jim [1900]. 
New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. (Deep 
Sea Edition.) 

See, for an accurate and nearly complete short 



324 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

bibliography of Conrad's principal writings as 
published in England and America, pp. 121-24 
of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole (New 
York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916. 
Writers of the Day). 
See XI. below. 
Of the great number of other specialized re- 
gional novelists, the following may be men- 
tioned: Sabine Baring-Gould (Devon); "Kath- 
arine Tynan" (Mrs. Katharine Tynan Hinkson) 
and Jane Barlow (Ireland) ; "G. A. Birming- 
ham" (Ireland) ; William Clark Russell and 
William Wymark Jacobs (sailors and the sea) ; 
Israel Zangwill (the Ghetto) ; Thomas Alexan- 
der Browne (Australia) ; Sir Hugh Clifford 
(Malay Archipelago) ; and Archibald Marshall 
(British provincial gentry). The most impor- 
tant direct influence of Hardy's Wessex Novels 
appears in the works of Eden Phillpotts {Chil- 
dren of the Mist, Sons of the Morning, The 
Harbor, The Thief of Virtue, Widecombe Fair, 
etc.) and in those of John Trevena (see espe- 
cially his moorland trilogy, Furze, Heather, and 
Granite; with epilogue, Gorse. New York: 
Moffat, Yard & Co. 1912-). See also, among 
very recent novels, Sussex Gorse, by Sheila 
Kaye-Smith. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 
1916). 

XI. A supplementary selection of striking developments 
in naturalism, impressionism, sestheticism, the 
scientific spirit, Continental influence, etc., 
1880-1918. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 325 

William Morris. 

The Boots of the Mountains [1890]. Lon- 
don: Longman. The Story of the Glittering 
Plain [1890]. London: Longman. The Wood 
Beyond the World [1895]. London: Longman. 
The Well at the World's End [1896]. London: 
Longman. The Water of the Wondrous Isles 
[1897]. London: Longman. The Sundering 
Flood [1898]. London: Longman. 

(Essays in Gothic and mediaeval romance; 
prose poems characterized by sensuous beauty 
of style and substance.) 
"Fiona Macleod" (William Sharp). 

Pharais: a Bomance of the Isles [1894]. 
The Mountain Lovers [1895]. Green Fire 
[1896]. Silence Farm [1899; published under 
his own name] . In Collected Works. London : 
Heinemann. 7 vols. 1911. 

(Fantasies akin to those of Morris, but char- 
acterized also by a unique blend of Celtic mys- 
ticism and quite modern realism.) 
George Moore. 

A Modern Lover [1883]. London: Walter 
Scott. A Mummer's Wife [1884]. New York: 
Brentano's. A Drama in Muslin [1888]. Lon- 
don: Vizetelly. Out of print. Esther Waters 
[1894]. London: Walter Scott. Evelyn 
Innes [1898]. New York: Appleton. Sister 
Teresa [1901]. New York: Appleton. 

(A development of naturalistic realism culmi- 
nating in Esther Waters, and tending there- 
after to become aesthetic and debilitated.) 



326 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



An interesting essay on Moore is that in G. K. 
Chesterton's Heretics (New York: Dodd, Mead 
& Co. 1905). See also The Mstheticism of 
George Moore in Stuart P. Sherman's Main 
Tendencies in Contemporary Literature (New 
York: Henry Holt and Co. 1917). 
Oscar Wilde. 

The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891]. Lon- 
don: Ward & Locke. Also in Works, limited 
edition, Methuen, 1907-9. 

(A brilliant expression of Wilde's own tragic 
perversity.) 
Theodore Watts-Dunton. 

Aylwin [1898; written about 1885]. New 
York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 

(The expression of an aesthete's conception of 
immortality, and a notable embodiment of the 
Late Victorian aesthetic movement.) 
Mrs. J. Humphry Ward. 

Robert Elsmere [1888]. New York: Mac- 
millan. 

(A study of the decay of orthodoxy within 
the Church.) 
Robert Louis Stevenson. 

The Merry Men [1887]. The Strange Case 
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1886]. In 1 vol., 
New York: Scribner. 

(Two remarkable examples of expansion of 
the short-story into the modern novella.) 
Stephen Crane. 

The Bed Badge of Courage [1895]. New 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 327 

York : Appleton. New edition, with Preface by 
Arthur Guy Empey, 1917. 

(A great and perfect piece of realistic im- 
pressionism, dealing with one isolated phase of 
the American Civil War.) 
William Hurrell Mallock. 

The New Republic: Culture, Faith, and Phi- 
losophy in an English Country House [1877]. 
New York: Scribner. The New Paul and Vir- 
ginia: Positivism on an Island [1878], New 
York: Scribner. The Individualist [1899]. 
London : Chapman & Hall. 

(Shrewd and diverting satires on contempo- 
rary movements in science, politics, philosophy, 
and social life.) 
Ambrose Bierce. 

The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter 
[1911; written about 1890]. New York: Neale 
Publishing Co. (Vol. 6 of Collected Works.) 

(A romantic fantasia quite unspoiled by its 
satiric purpose.) 
"Mark Twain" (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). 

The Mysterious Stranger. New York: Har- 
per & Bros. 1916 [posthumous]. 

(Mark Twain's one expression in fiction of the 
misanthropic pessimism which appears to have 
been his life-long philosophy.) 
Frank Norris. 

McTeague: a Story of San Francisco [1899]. 
New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. The Octo- 
pus: a Story of California [1901]. New York: 
Doubleday, Page & Co. 



328 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

(Pictures of economic conditions and histories 
of class struggles; among the first American 
novels to show the transition to modern natural- 
ism from the earlier sentimentalism.) 
Olive Schreiner. 

The Story of an African Farm [1883]. Bos- 
ton: Little, Brown. Trooper Peter Ealket of 
Mashonaland [1897], Boston: Little, Brown. 

(Powerful economic and sociologic tracts in 
the form of fiction.) 
W. H. Hudson. 

The Purple Land [1885]. New York: E. P. 
Dutton & Co. Green Mansions [1904]. New 
York : Alfred A. Knopf. 1916. A Crystal Age 
[1887]. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 

(Stories that combine richness of imagina- 
tion with a delicate precision of style hardly 
seen before in English. A Crystal Age is a 
modern variation of the Utopian romance; Tlie 
Purple Land and Green Mansions are, in part, 
sumptuous landscapes of South America.) 
Leonard Merrick. 

Cynthia [1896]. London: Chatto & Windus. 
The Worldlings [1900]. New York: Double- 
day, Page & Co. Conrad in Quest of his Youth 
[1903]. New York: Mitchell Kennerley. The 
House of Lynch [1907]. New York: McClure. 
The Position of Peggy Harper [1911]. New 
York: Mitchell Kennerley. 

(An artist's stories of the artistic tempera- 
ment in various manifestations ; delicately ironic 
realism, the method slight, but the sense prob- 
ing.) 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 329 

William Somerset Maugham. 

Liza of Lambeth [1897]. London: Fisher 
Unwin. The Hero [1901]. London: Hutchin- 
son. The Merry-Go-Bound [1904]. London: 
Heinemann. 

(As uncompromising an exhibition of 
"murky" realism as can be found in English. 
Liza of Lambeth has a noticeable resemblance 
to Moore's Esther Waters.) 
Jack London. 

The Call of the Wild [1903]. New York: 
Macmillan. The Sea-Wolf [1904], New York : 
Macmillan. 

(Perhaps the best American examples of mod- 
ern impressionistic realism in treatment of the 
primitive struggle for survival.) 
Joseph Conrad. 

The Nigger of the "Narcissus" [1897]. New 
York: Dodd, Mead & Co. (as "Children of the 
Sea," without the original preface) . New York : 
Doubleday, Page & Co. (under original title, 
with the preface restored). 1914. Heart of 
Darkness [1902]. New York: Doubleday, Page 
& Co (in Youth). Typhoon [1903]. New 
York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 

(Supreme examples of modern unity in work- 
manship, secured by impressionistic treatment 
in works of length approaching that of the 
novel.) 

Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard [1904]. 
New York: Harper & Bros. (A tremendous 
pageant of material interests, epitomizing mod- 



330 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

ern life in a romantic story of heroic dimen- 
sions, set in a South American republic.) 

Under Western Eyes [1911]. New York: 
Harper & Bros. The Secret Agent [1907]. 
New York: Harper & Bros. (Two novels of 
the revolutionary and anarchistic spirit, the 
first-named written in the spirit of Dostoevsky.) 

All of Conrad's novels and tales are pub- 
lished in a uniform edition by Doubleday, Page 
& Co. (New York.) 

See Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole (New 
York: Henry Holt and Co. Writers of the 
Day). There is a valuable essay on Conrad in 
A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken (New 
York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1917). Note also 
A Personal Record, by Joseph Conrad (New 
York: Harper & Bros. 1912), and the Preface 
to The Nigger of the "Narcissus/' See C. 
under X. above. 

Herbert George Wells. 

Tono-Bungay [1909]. New York: Duffield & 
Co. The New Machiavelli [1910]. New York: 
Duffield & Co. 

(Expressions, the one in terms of commerce 
and science, the other in terms of political life, 
of a typically modern conflict between the will 
of the individual and the will of society.) 

See H. G. Wells, by J. D. Beresford (New 
York: Henry Holt and Co. 1915. Writers of 
the Day). 

See also VI. above. 



BIBLIOCxRAPHY 331 

Hilaire Belloe. 

Mr. Clutterbuck's Election [1908]. London: 
Nash. A Change in the Cabinet [1909]. Lon- 
don: Methuen. Pongo and the Bull [1910]. 
London: Constable. 

(Deft satires of political and social tend- 
encies in contemporary life, by an observer 
who distrusts both the democratic tendency as it 
exists and the conservatism, which opposes it.) 

The Girondin [1911]. London: Nelson. 
(The same attitude expressed in a powerful his- 
torical novel.) 

"Maarten Maartens." 

God's Fool: a Koopstad Story [1892]. New 
York: Appleton. 

(An odd and striking' study of abnormality, 
with a sociologie and humanitarian bias.) 

Edith Wharton. 

Ethan Frome [1911]. New York: Charles 
Scribner's Sons. Madame de Treymes [1907]. 
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 

(Two noteworthy American employments of 
the novella form as practised by Henry James; 
cf. his Spoils of Poynton.) 

The House of Mirth [1905]. New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 

(A longer work with the same unity of im- 
pression.) 

See, for The Valley of Decision, IX. above. 

Edward Frederick Benson. 

Dodo: a Detail of To-Day [1893]. New 



332 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

York: Appleton. Mammon & Co. [1899]. 
New York: Appleton. 

(Satiric descriptions of frothy smart society.) 

Limitations [1896]. New York: Harper & 
Bros. The Challoners [1904], London: Heine- 
mann. 

(More serious accounts of the creative or 
poetic temper in its clash with the static ele- 
ments of society.) 
Enoch Arnold Bennett. 

The Old Wives' Tale [1908]. New York: 
Doran. New edition with Preface by author, 
1911. Clayhanger [1910]. New York: E. P. 
Dutton & Co. 

(Minute and exhaustive realism applied to 
industrial life in the north of England, in a 
successful effort to prove that nothing is com- 
monplace. The first-named is the one great 
piece of recent realism in English which suc- 
cessfully combines the Early Victorian large- 
ness with Gallic nicety of design and finish.) 

See Arnold Bennett, by F. J. Harvey Darton. 
New York: Henry Holt and Co. 1916. 
Robert Hugh Benson. 

The Sentimentalists [1906]. New York: 
Benziger. The Necromancers [1909]. St. 
Louis: Herder. A Winnowing [1910]. St. 
Louis: Herder. 

(Three of several novels in which the author 
attempts to apply Roman Catholicism as a 
solvent to a succession of intricate individual 
problems of conduct and thought.) 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 333 

John Galsworthy. 

The Man of Property [1906]. New York: 
Putnam. The Country House [1907]. New 
York: Putnam. Fraternity [1909]. New- 
York: Putnam. The Patrician [1911]. New 
York: Scribner. 

(Tragi-comedies of individual and class limi- 
tations, written with an unique formal exquis- 
iteness. Note especially the perfection of de- 
sign in each chapter considered as a separate 
unit.) 

John Galsworthy. By Sheila Kaye-Smith. 
New York: Henry Holt and Co. (Writers of 
the Day.) 
Ford Madox Hueffer. 

An English Girl [1907]. London: Methuen. 
Ladies Whose Bright Eyes [1911]. London: 
Constable. 

(Dexterous satires of modern materialism, by 
an author to whom the restraint of art seems 
the one possible guide to fine living.) 
Max Beerbohm. 

Zuleika Dobson; or, an Oxford Love Story 
[1911]. New York: Lane. Also No. 50 of the 
Modern Library, with introduction by Francis 
Hackett (New York: Boni & Liveright). 
Morley Roberts. 

In Low Belief [1890]. New York: Appleton. 
A Son of Empire [1899]. Philadelphia: J. B. 
Iippincott Co. The Colossus [1899]. New 
York: Harper & Bros. Immortal Youth 
[1902]. London: Hutchinson. 



334 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

(The first- and last-named are novels of the 
artist; the others, novels of empire dealing with 
elemental forces in human nature. The writer's 
works are fairly well represented by these two 
groups.) 
Theodore Dreiser. 

Sister Carrie [1900]. New York: Double- 
day, Page & Co. [Suppressed.] New edition: 
Harper, 1912. Jennie Gerhardt [1911]. New 
York: Harper & Bros. The Titan [1914]. 
New York: John Lane Company. 

(Embodiments of a naturalism akin to that of 
Moore's Esther Waters. For two opposed esti- 
mates, see Theodore Dreiser in A Book of Pref- 
aces, by H. L. Mencken (New York: Alfred A. 
Knopf, 1917) and The Naturalism of Theodore 
Dreiser in Main Tendencies in Contemporary 
Literature, by Stuart P. Sherman (New York: 
Henry Holt and Co. 1917.) 
Hugh Walpole. 

The Dark Forest [1916]. New York: Doran. 

(A sombre and profoundly imaginative treat- 
ment of Russian character and temperament 
interpreted through a Galician campaign of the 
Great War.) 
James Branch Cabell. 

The Soul of Melicent [1913]. New York: 
Stokes. 

(A romance made of the authentic essence of 
Aucassin and Nicolette, but replacing the medi- 
aeval naivete with an extremely delicate con- 
scious care, and illuminating realities of life 
and love that do not change.) 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 335 

The Cords of Vanity [1908]. Doubleday, 
Page & Co. Out of print. The Rivet in Grand- 
father's Neck [1915]. New York: McBride. 
The Cream of the Jest [1917]. New York: 
McBride. 

(Quizzical but searching studies of the same 
realities in their relation to modern environ- 
ment). 
Ethel Sidgwick. 

The Accolade [1915]. Boston: Small, May- 
nard. Hatchways [1916]. Boston: Small, 
Maynard. 

(Firm and delicate high comedy; the touch of 
Jane Austen applied, with more than her depth 
and sincerity, to the country aristocracy of con- 
temporary England.) 
Frank Swinnerton. 

Nocturne [1918] . New York : Doran. 

(Except for one minor flaw, this is a con- 
summate example of the novella form of The 
Spoils of Poynton, Ethan Frome, etc. In unity 
and harmony, restriction of the number of 
characters and scenes, and the disinterestedness 
of its acceptance of life, it typifies the modern 
crystallization of a new form of fiction, half- 
way between the novel and the short-story, and 
combining the formal merits of both.) 
Joseph Hergesheimer. 

The Three Black Pennys [1917]. Gold and 
Iron [three stories; 1918]. Java Head [1919]. 
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 

(Two novels and a volume of short stories 



336 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

among the few pieces of recent American or 
English fiction which, in both thought and work- 
manship, challenge judgment by French stand- 
ards.) 



OCT 1 



